Zoom crashes with pipewire audio

[twt2]

I installed and activated pipewire audio to see if I could make Zoom work with a Bluetooth speakerphone. (I couldn't, though its setup with pipewire failed differently than under pulseaudio.) I installed pipewire from the "official" PPA.

But I noticed Zoom would start and then crash completely when I opened a meeting or setup window.

I apologize I don't know the exact crash info... on restart Zoom sent crash reports, apparently to Zoom.

I found that even after reverting the setup to pulseaudio Zoom continued to crash, sometimes even after a reboot. But something else has helped because after a full shutdown and restart Zoom again works correctly.

I noticed after the crashes resolved, when launching Zoom from a terminal there's a message about "Testing for explicit PulseAudio choice...". I don't believe I've launched Zoom from a terminal before it crashed so I don't know if that message is new.

I'm running Ubuntu 21.04 and the crashes with pipewire happened on Wayland. I sometimes login using X11 to make screen sharing work better but I didn't try X11 and pipewire together.

(I presume screen sharing might eventually work better under Wayland using pipewire video.)

I have since purged the pipewire PPA

[twt2]

unfortunately zoom-client snap crashed today again; no changes on my end. I tried from another user account on the same system in case some configuration cruft is causing the failure; it failed there as well.

I used snap remove zoom-client to uninstall and downloaded and installed the deb version from Zoom and that one worked for the urgent meeting.

SO I'll try to do some better post-mortem in a bit.

[twt2]

I've edited this comment with more info.

So far all the crashes may have been running zoom-client on Wayland. It doesn't seem to crash (or crashes more infrequently) on Xorg.

I believe zoom-client did NOT crash immediately when I created a new meeting

The meeting it's crashing for is a "perpetually open" meeting with a password that I am not a host for.

I created a VirtualBox VM for Hirsute (to be sure I had a more pristine environment)

I installed pipewire-audio-client-libraries (using apt)

zoom-client crashes when connecting to a meeting

I removed pipewire-audio-client-libraries

zoom-client launches and connects normally

SO there's some issue with pipewire-audio-client-libraries.

HOWEVER removing that package from my host system has NOT fixed the breaking zoom-client snap so there's presumably some other pipewire cruft or something floating around. I uninstalled all the pipewire chunks and config files one at a time and it's still crashing on Wayland.