Arch Linux

KerrickStaley

Member

Registered: 2011-01-26

Posts: 32

[SOLVED] Sound broken on Dell XPS 15 laptop after recent update

I have a Dell XPS 15 from 2017, and after a pacman -Syu today, I do not hear sound from the build-in speakers, and I no longer see the built-in speakers listed in Pavucontrol or GNOME Settings's Sound panel. The only output device that Pulseaudio mentions is "HDMI / DisplayPort (unplugged)".

I tried downgrading the kernel and Pulseaudio to their previous versions (kernel 6.8.9.arch1-2 -> 6.8.7.arch1-1, PulseAudio 17.0-3 -> 16.1-6) and rebooting, but the issue persisted.

Alsamixer shows a "Speaker" output on the "HDA Intel PCH" sound card, so I think Alsa is not the problem.

alsactl info output
pactl list output
Pacman logs from today
Verbose output from Pulseaudio start-up

Update: I tried downgrading all packages to the version from 2024-04-26 (when I last updated) using archive.archlinux.org. However, the problem still exists. Another thing I noticed is that the speakers work on the login screen in GDM, but don't work once I log in to my user session.

Update 2: Doing

rm -r ~/.config/pulse

and rebooting seemed to fix the problem. I'm not sure what the exact issue is. I also did

mv /etc/pulse{,.bak}; pacman -S pulseaudio

before that reboot, but a subsequent

rm -r /etc/pulse; mv /etc/pulse{.bak,}

didn't re-introduce the issue, so I think it was unrelated.

Last edited by KerrickStaley (2024-05-12 03:28:56)