i am currently using kubuntu 25.04

i’ve been using linux mint and had this dummy output in the sound settings, tried to figure out to fix that and failed (made a huge “mess” trying to set up the audio, all this mess over audio. but at least i had my timeshift snapshots).

now that i switched to kubuntu, i went into my sound settings and now my sound chips (intel lunar lake-M HD Audio Controller) are finally present thanks to KDE plasma. there’s no need to install pavucontrol but all i need to do is set up alsamixer to make the audio work. but it keeps muting after rebooting, the only way to turn on the audio after rebooting is opening up terminal and manually turn the sound by typing “sudo alsactl restore” which i find it weird because imagine having to listen to music or watching youtube and you have to use the terminal to manually activate the audio. (i’m new to linux and not that used to it)

i tried to do some methods to automatically restore the alsamixer setting like making systemd run this command after rebooting and it fails (i did the same thing on linux mint and it fails).

i still use timeshift and create snapshots in case i mess something up. (i used to reinstall an entire OS to fix things until i discovered timeshift)

what is going on here? could that be pipewire? could that be the kernels? could that my drivers or my fireware? what else could that be?

if you want me to show the details of my firmware, drivers, kernel, etc. through the terminal, let me know and tell me what needs to be solved.

  • tal@olio.cafeEnglish
    6·
    12 hours ago

    there’s no need to install pavucontrol but all i need to do is set up alsamixer to make the audio work

    If you want to fiddle the audio at the ALSA level — the hardware — you can, but my guess is that in 2025, unless you have some kind of exotic need, what you probably want is for PipeWire to be setting the volume.

    On my system, I use pavucontrol and pipewire-pulse — using pavucontrol doesn’t entail using PulseAudio. If you really know what you’re doing and you’re confident that you want to go bare ALSA, then you can probably go have systemd run a script at boot to run an alsactl restore command. I am pretty confident that that’s not what you want to do.

    It looks like there’s a native console PipeWire mixer in Debian in the form of pipemixer, and I’d imagine that KDE Plasma probably has some sort of graphical mixer that either can talk natively to PipeWire or uses the pipewire-pulse PipeWire emulation of PulseAudio.

    EDIT: Basically, you probably want:

    ------------  
|Sound Card|  
------------  

------------  
|   ALSA   |  
------------  

------------  
| PipeWire | <- You interact with the audio stack at this layer  
------------

    EDIT2: You should probably see that a user-level pipewire is running if you log into your KDE environment and open a virtual termainal and you run:

    $ systemctl status --user pipewire.service

    It should say something like:

    Active: active (running) since Tue 2025-09-02 00:27:11 PDT; 1 week 6 days ago

    If you have the PulseAudio emulation support active, then ditto for:

    $ systemctl status --user pipewire-pulse.service

    I don’t use KDE, so I don’t know what the KDE mixer program is called or does, whether it talks natively to PipeWire or uses the PulseAudio interface, but KDE Plasma probably puts some sort of volume control in a system tray or something. And it’ll probably use one of those two APIs to talk to PipeWire.

    EDIT3: Basically, the only times I’d have been wanting to run things through ALSA directly were:

    • When it was introduced but before any standardized sound server was deployed, so maybe early 2000s.

    • Until JACK and later PipeWire showed up, talking directly to the hardware was a way to keep latency low for real-time processing, so there were some reasons you might want to do this if you were using pro audio.

    • Early PulseAudio was pretty broken, so I wound up using ALSA in preference to it.

    But that’s all pretty much ancient history now.

    • Nyxie@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      10 hours ago

      i ran $ systemctl status --user pipewire service and got this

      is there something else i can solve?

      • tal@olio.cafeEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        Looks fine to me. I don’t use KDE, but searching, it looks like KDE Plasma’s audio mixer is “plasma-pa”. The “pa” there will stand for “PulseAudio”, so at least at one point, it’ll have been based on PulseAudio. I dunno if it talks natively to Pipewire now.

        kagis

        https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/v8hbyb/something_like_plasmapa_for_pipewire/

        If you have the pipewire-pulse compatibility layer installed (which you really should), plasma-pa will work without any problems. Right now there is no pure PipeWire equivalent of it.

        That was three years ago, so might be out of date, but at least then, it still used the PulseAudio API, so it may need pipewire-pulse to be active. In any event, I don’t think that it’d hurt to have pipewire-pulse.

        I’d check and make sure that pipewire-pulse is active too, and if so, try using plasma-pa to have PipeWire set the volume to whatever it is that you want set to. I assume that once you’ve set a volume with PipeWire, PipeWire will handle restoring it next time you log in. It does on my system.