No sound, no sound devices after removing/reinstalling pulseaudio

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1

While troubleshooting lack of sound from notifications I found a recommendation to reinstall pulseaudio. Bad decision. After doing that I have no audio devices shown anywhere, sound playback via VLC uses a dummy output device.

This is what the sound setup looks like. Help please?

 System:
 Host: Bismarck Kernel: 6.8.0-40-generic x86_64 bits: 64
 Desktop: KDE Plasma 6.1.5 Distro: KDE neon 22.04 6.0
 Machine:
 Type: Laptop System: SLIMBOOK product: EXCALIBUR-16-AMD8 v: 1.0
serial: <superuser required>
Mobo: SLIMBOOK model: EXCALIBUR-16-AMD8 v: 1.0
serial: <superuser required> UEFI: American Megatrends v: SLIMH6.03
date: 05/29/2024
Audio:
Device-1: AMD driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-2: AMD Family 17h HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k6.8.0-40-generic running: yes
Sound Server-2: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes

Pulseaudio used to also show up as the third sound server before but now it doesn’t despite being reinstalled.

2

You probably need to make sure that the services for this have been enabled.

If you don’t have a backup or a system snapshot, you can try re-enabling it

Do not use sudo here.

systemctl --user unmask pulseaudio

This un-hides the service

systemctl --user --now enable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user --now start pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket

These enable, then starts the services.

You may see errors. These can be helpful to see.

I am not an expert in this at all, so you may need to seek help from other places with more Ubuntu specific experience.

3

This worked, but didn’t survive a reboot. Now I have pasystray running where it didn’t before (instead of the default Plasma volume control), and it doesn’t show any audio sources.

Is there a way to get back to the original pipewire based sound system? I think the KDE settings and volume control are missing because they only work with that.