Pipewire cursed sound devices

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1

Hello,
I have dipped my toes in linux before, but recently decided to fully make the jump because windows was getting increasingly bad.
I have been enjoying my experience with KDE neon so far but found that discord screenshare did not want to work on wayland.
Since my multiscreen setup and steam games did not play nice with x11, i decided to try and figure out what the screenshare problem was, which ended up being outdated pipewire.

Upgrading pipewire was quite a pain and i ended up pretty much brute-forcing the install by adding the noble repository which had a more up-to-date version, and running sudo aptitude install pipewire.
It managed to get it installed which fixed the discord screenshare, but now I have an entirely new problem…

Every sound device is the same, which ever sound device i enabled last is replicated across every device.
If I plug in my microphone, every single plugged in device makes the same sound as my microphone.
If I plug in headphones, only those headphones will have sound and nothing else.

Weirdly enough the properties for the individual devices seem correct.
If I plug in my capture card with stereo audio and then listen to my headphone mic, it comes trough as mono,
And if I then unplug and plug back in my headphones and listen to my capture card, I will hear my microphone only on the left channel.

So the properties look correct but the data coming in is coming from the wrong place.

I have been battling this all day and cant find any solutions to this, does anybody have any idea?

2

I just realised the drivers listed are snd_hda_intel, but im using an AMD cpu,
could that in any way be the cause of the problem?

b550aoruselitev2:~$ inxi -A
Audio:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GA104 High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-2: AMD Renoir Radeon High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-3: AMD Family 17h HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-4: Logitech PRO X Wireless Gaming Headset type: USB
    driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid
  Device-5: ezcap LIVE GAMER RAW type: USB
    driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid,uvcvideo
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k6.8.0-40-generic running: yes
  Sound Server-2: PipeWire v: 1.0.5 running: yes
3

Check the settings and ensure the virtual device is not selected. Brute forcing Noble is not something I would have recommended.

Screenshot_20240819_142328
Screenshot_20240819_142328843Ă—335 16.5 KB

I am more than a little surprised that Steam and Discord did not work in X11. They perform between 15 and 60% better in X11 than Wayland, and if you play games, I strongly suggest you get X11 sorted.

4

Onboard sound is based on the Intel HD codec so even AMD motherboards use Intel sound.

5

I decided since i only installed 3 days ago i wouldnt lose much by re-installing my PC again, so i did that.
I found that mantic has a slightly newer version of pipewire on it than the default repositories do and it seems like discord screenshare works with it, so I installed that and immideately removed mantic from my sources.list before i mess up anything again.

6

discord works fine with x11, but my steam games always boot on the wrong monitor and dragging them to the correct screen will make the in-game mouse pointer bug out and get stuck on the left edge of the screen, and every time i alt-tab the game drags itself back to the left screen again.
also it just feels choppier somehow, like there’s micro stutter when im on x11

7

Yeah, I know that problem. It appears it may be an issue with Wine/Proton and Kwin. The worst culprit for this is anything that uses the EA launcher in Steam. I have worked around this by ensuring that the steam library page is on the primary monitor, and then clicking on the primary screen desktop right after launching (and in between the EA launcher and actual game launch) which seems to force the focus back to the correct screen.

It still occasionally fails, but a restart of the game often results in it then going to the correct monitor.

I am slowly beginning to understand the cause (the way Kwin is handling some kinds of windows), but have not yet come up with a solid fix. If you are experiencing choppy or microstutters than the problem is likely your GPU driver. What GPU are you using?

8

i use a Nvidia RTX 3070, how do you manage to get focus on the correct screen at all?
i cant seem to get the games to launch on the correct screen no matter how agressively i click on my primary window desktop

9

I suggest using NV 550 as my own testing and benchmarking has shown 535, 545, and 555 to have various errors and issues. Did you get the kernel upgrade to 6.8 yet? This seems to have helped a bit. Wayland is a mess with all drivers when it comes to games, though 535 has the best performance results - the problem is FPS just won’t go above the screen sync rate and I am capped at 60fps in OpenGL/Vulkan.

To keep the focus I click the panel and or the “hidden tray icons” button.

10

i am using 550 right now as well, this screen focus and mouse issue only occurs on x11 which is why i wanted to use wayland instead.
on x11 it appears as tho the mouse input proton recieves is clamped to the edge of the screen, so if i move onto the second screen to the right, it will just act as if its all the way on the left edge and aggresively spin my camera at all times and completely lock my ability to navigate any menus

11

What game is this, or is it all of them?

What happens if you reset if from running in “fullscreen” to “full screen windowed”? I have had mouse capture issues as well, but not as you describe (which seems to have been resolved with recent updates).

What I suggest is to do a driver purge:

If you do not have it, install the the driver manager from Kubuntu.

sudo apt install software-properties-qt

Then run it from the menu. Go to additional drivers, and change it to Nouveau.

Reboot (it may take a minute for Nouveau to sort itself out, don’t panic).

Open a term and type:

sudo apt-get --purge nvidia-*

When it is done, type:

sudo apt-get clean (to clean the download cache)
sudo apt-get autoremove (to clean up old headers and kernel modules)

reboot (optional, but I figure better safe than sorry).

Then open up the Kubuntu driver app again and select the one you want. If 550 is not working correctly then try 555 or even downgrade to 545, or 535.

Reboot (I occasionally get a black screen and pointer when starting up the first time after the driver install at this point, but it goes away with another reboot and does not occur again).

For me, this is mostly resolved now, with only Kodi, one older benchmark (running in wine) and the game “Mass Effect LE” still having some issues.

The other thing I might suggest is playing with the Proton settings. Some games play better on older versions, and not so well with 9 or Experimental.

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12

That’s cool, I didn’t know you could install that in Neon, right on!

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13

Thank you, I was in the middle of a render competition when i decided to switch to linux and am running into too many issues.
I really want to try this out to see if it fixes the problems i have but I will wait until the end of the month when the challenge is over.

In wayland, the plasma desktop environment stopped working outright despite the only things i have changed being pipewire and the nvidia drivers and I was starting to get really frustrated, but it is most likely an nvidia issue because the first attempt at installing drivers failed at building kernels but still claimed to be installed despite clearly not functioning.
all in all, I want to sort this stuff out but will wait until i have more free time until i do so.
curse you windows, i want to leave you behind so bad…

14

Because my pc suddenly decided that my on board graphics should stop working, and because i couldnt see the boot screen, I had no choice but to boot into linux again as it was set by default.

I followed your guide and it actually brought my wayland desktop back from the dead, however i was getting much worse performance than before, im guessing nv555 isnt working that well.
Also one of the 2 games i play (Deep Rock Galactic) stopped working.
I found on proton 8.0 my mouse pointer issue did not occur and can now properly play my other games, and am in the proccess of re-installing nv550 to see if that will run better again.

In any case, thanks for the advice!

Before i forget, the bios not showing on the gpu connected monitors and on-board hdmi not working kinda just resolved itself

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15

I highly discourage people from dual booting Windows and Linux or multiple Linuxs. The issue is modern systems use UEFI which is shared by both OS’s as there can only be one active EFI partition on a system. This causes problems. These days I install a “portable” version of Kubuntu on an external SSD while isolated from the Windows or other Linux EFI.

Basically after you boot the live USB, but before you install to the external, you need to use either gparted or Kpartion to unset the boot flag on the internal drive before installing to the external drive, which creates a new EFI partition on the external, then resetting it back to the internal drive after installing, but before rebooting.

Then the external can be launched with either f12 (or whatever bios key gives you the bios boot loader) or in my case, by setting “USB UEFI Hard Drive” as a higher priority in the bios boot order which just launches it automatically when its plugged in during a reboot.

I called this “portable” in quotes because its not truly portable… it is still tied to your hardware, its just now better isolated. If you do not isolate the EFI partion, then you will have to plug the portable in even if you are not booting to it.