KDE neon is one of the two Linux distros that I’ve been able to find where the audio on my old 360 with an Intel Broadwell Sound card actually works. The other happens to be OpenSuSe of all things. However I’m concerned in the future that it may break with an update and I’m going to scramble to try to figure out how to get it working again. Can anybody give me enough information about how kde neon is set up for audio now that might be a clue as to why my sound card is working with it and almost nothing else?
Afaik neon is based on Ubuntu LTS. You didn’t say which opensuse you used, tumbleweed or leap? If it is the latter my guess it is because your sound card is either not maintained on newer kernels or there is a bug in newer kernels.
Which kernel version do you use? you can check with uname -a
uname -a
Linux 360 6.5.0-26-generic #26~22.04.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Mar 12 10:22:43 UTC 2 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
And my fear is yes, the sound card is not maintained in new kernels… is there any way to preserve functioning when the kernel gets upgraded?
Is this a dedicated sound card or is it integrated in the cpu?
Which exactly is your computer model? And if we are talking about an integrated sound chip then which cpu model is that?
It’s an HP Spectre 360 laptop, 8GB RAM, Intel i7-5500-U @2.4GHz, GPU is Mesa Intel HD Graphics 5500
lspci results audio device as Intel Broadwell-U rev 03
First of all you need to make sure that your bios is up-to-date.
Apparently (according to the internet’s collective wisdom) it seems like the particular sound chip likes to output to hdmi first, so according to arch’s wiki, if you put the following line in some conf file in /etc/modprobe.d/, it should work
options snd_hda_intel index=1,0
Tried that… no help. 
What do you mean with “does not work”. That is a VERY broad description and pretty much impossible to answer without more info.
According to this you have a Intel HD Graphics 5500 that handles the audio.
And according to this it is supported in the kernel
You can find if my analysis is correct by reading and doing this:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005520/graphics.html
Things are very rarely removed from the kernel, and that the drivers for an intel i7-5500-U would be is just out of the question.
You do not have to worry about that.
Edit
But then there is also this bug, but not sure it is only on Haswell or if Broadwell is also included.
It is referenced here on Arch wiki.
You are on neon, but you could always try and see if it helps to disable IOMMU.
I am not 100% on how to implement that arch wiki with Neon though, maybe someone else has input about that.
Thanks… the interesting thing is that it works on KDE Neon and Opensuse, but on literally dozens of other distros, no sound at all, or fiddling with alfamixer gets very, very low volume. Puzzling.
So it DOES work, but is low volume, that is a completely different situation.
Sorry, I have no more ideas.
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