What are the main differences between pipewire and pulseaudio?
Which one is better?
What are other alternative popular sound servers besides these two?
Pulseaudio was always buggy for me. I've only tried pipewire recently and so far I've had no issues.
The only downside is that (from having to do so much troubleshooting) I know more or less how to configure and tweak pulseaudio. If I ever decide to do weird sound things with pipewire, I'm starting from scratch.
Pipewire came installed by default on my OpenSUSE TW install and I never get audio in games. I have to constantly switch audio devices until it finally decides to work. I swapped it out for pulseaudio and I've never had an issue since.