I think Debian 12 only installs Pipewire by default if you use the default desktop environment (GNOME). I selected XFCE, and Pipewire was not installed.
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Look, I’ve never used Gnome3. Always and only Mate or FluxBox. When I upgraded from Debian 11 to Debian 12, against my will, I found Pipewire installed by default. You can check your situation typing “pactl info” into a terminal and see what it gives you under “Server Name.” If it gives you “on PipeWire” in parentheses, you’re already running PipeWire
Here’s my output →
:~$ pactl info
Stringa server: /run/user/1000/pulse/native
Versione protocollo libreria: 35
Versione protocollo server: 35
Locale: sì
Indice client: 85
Dimensione tile: 65472
Nome utente: patrizio
Nome host: PUSSYFLAKE-001
Nome server: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.65)
Versione server: 15.0.0
Specifica di campionamento predefinita: float32le ch 2 48000 Hz
Mappa del canale predefinita: front-left,front-right
Sink predefinito: alsa_output.usb-BEHRINGER_UMC204HD_192k-00.Direct__hw_U192k__sink
Sorgente predefinita: alsa_input.usb-BEHRINGER_UMC204HD_192k-00.Direct__hw_U192k__source
Cookie: da38:303c
If the terminal only shows you “PulseAudio” without anything following it, your system isn’t running PipeWire. Good luck!
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I obviously can’t speak to why it installed on your system, but I did a clean install instead of an upgrade, and Pipewire isn’t present on my system using the XFCE desktop, so that is one means for a user to avoid it on Debian 12.
I am very sorry all - I didn’t mean to start any debates by mentioning the F-word!
I’d better point out that my use case might be different to most. Desktop environment and desktop workflow matters to me greatly because I use my computer for office first, audio very much second and as a hobby, not professional.
Anyone following what I do by using Pipewire and Flatpak should know that there are trade-offs in performance and utility, in return for a drastically lowered barrier to entry. Try as I might I was just not able to get things working fantastically when I tried going for Ardour Linux builds and JACK; I’m sure I could if I put more time into it, but my computer is also used by other people in my household and I don’t want to disrupt things for them too much. If I could get JACK configured to work at all, I wasn’t able to get shared audio working consistently (piping Pulse through JACK), Guitarix plugins wouldn’t work properly due to dependency version conflicts between it and Ardour, and other little things.
For what it’s worth, I am comfy with Ardour as a Flatpak and Pipewire, and nearly every one of my plugins is also a Flatpak - installing flatpak versions of plugins results in them being picked up by Ardour on first run with no configuration required. I can load external plugins from a folder as long as Ardour is given permission to that folder (done graphically via Flatseal).
I’m running at 128 samples, about 5ms of latency. Xruns are not a problem during recording or playback, though they can crop up if another application is playing audio at the same time such as YouTube. I’m well aware that for anyone running a dedicated professional audio workstation, or playing live, a buffer size above 64 would likely be unacceptable. I’m just coming at this as a hobbyist that wants to be able to spin up a working audio setup quickly and without much manual tuning – for professionals, performance should be top of mind, and all setup decisions made accordingly - that means JACK and no sandboxing.
I wasn’t aware that with an XFCE clean install you can avoid Pipepire. For what I read, Debian gave an outdated version of Pipewire. Anyway I have hopes it greatly improves along the years at least. I’m not scared by innovations. But I like to have stability over frequently searching for updates. Debian isn’t to avoid, please don’t say that, for sure isn’t a distro for beginners even using a stable version. The OP was already aware of his intentions and choices. He choosed AVLinux. A really great choice. A rock solid distro ready to use! 
I came across a post on linuxmusicians.com that indicates that Debian 12 (Bookworm) installs Pipewire if GNOME or MATE are the selected desktop, but not if KDE or XFCE are selected. The jury is still out on LXDE or LXQt, but I would assume those desktops are likely Pipewire-free. I think you misunderstood my post. I wasn’t advising users to avoid Debian 12, which I think is the best version to date. I was sharing that one can avoid Pipewire on Debian 12 by installing a different desktop environment in case that factored into one’s distro selection criteria.
Again, I was not aware that Mate had also chosen to use Pipewire, which however at the moment represents the lesser evil. It’s a change that I believe will be appreciated by many developers and by many old and new Linux users who already use it. There was probably a misinterpretation on my part. What I would like to say is that in my opinion, distroes derived from Debian in most cases are very valuable distributions. AVLInux is the first I can think about in terms of excellence. Of course I’m talking about what I know. People using completely different distributions that don’t use the .deb packaging system will surely think the same about their distro. Those who use Archlinux for example are super happy to have a rolling release distro that provides them the latest updates. As far as I’m concerned, my choice fell on Debian because I already knewd very well. As far as I know it’s the only one that allows you to install the operating system if the computer doesn’t boot from USB or the DVD player doesn’t work (correct me if I’m wrong). Years ago I was given an old SONY VAIO laptop, with window7 on-board (now windows10) which had and still has exactly these problems. Debian has created a very small program called win32-loader.exe which allows you to install the Linux operating system from within the Microsoft system. Without that little program I wouldn’t even have been able to run the installation, create partitions and install the base system. As far as I’m concerned, the choice of Mate comes only from the fact that I loved and still love Gnome2 (!). Anyway the desktop environment is just a matter of preferences, tastes, choice of colors and themes. But to be honest, the desktop environment that consumes less resources in terms of processor and memory is always the better choice. Fluxbox in that sense is what I use in most cases when the workload is a lot heavier. That’s the only criteria that really matters when I sit on front of my old laptop that runs like a charme.
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