UPDATE: After upgrade to Debian testing (trixie/sid): plasmoids still don't work, KDE doesn't find sound devices.

[A. F. Cano]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2023 at 12:40:30AM +0200, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> On Wednesday September 20 2023 13:12:02 A. F. Cano wrote:
> >ps -aux shows pipewire is running.  Kmix, that I had to install as it
> >didn't come installed by default, only shows the dummy output device.
> 
> On my system I often have to restart KMix after restarting the PA daemon,

On Debian testing the PA daemon is not running.  What is running is:

$ ps aux | grep pipewire
afc         1496  0.0  0.3 120476 14592 ?        S<sl 21:51   0:00 /usr/bin/pipewire
afc         1497  0.0  0.1  96348  6400 ?        Ssl  21:51   0:00 /usr/bin/pipewire -c filter-chain.conf
afc         1500  0.0  0.2 103332 10232 ?        S<sl 21:51   0:00 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
afc         3335  0.0  0.0   6344  2176 pts/4    S+   22:06   0:00 grep pipewire

> but that's mostly  to get the volume control buttons to work again. KDE uses
> Phonon for audio output, preferably with the Phonon VLC backend. This used
> to give you a choice out of all detected audio devices plus the pulseaudio
> (PA) daemon, in the version I have installed nowadays it has to be PA. IIRC
> there is a compatibility layer in PipeWire that makes it visible to
> applications that only support PA; you'll probably want to install that.

I see that there is a package called pipewire-audio-client-libraries,
whose purpose is:

  This package contains client libraries allowing programs designed for
  the ALSA, JACK and PulseAudio APIs to use a PipeWire server for audio
  playback and recording. They are not used by default, and are currently
  considered to be experimental.

But it depends on pipewire-alsa which, even after selecting it, aptitude
refuses to install.  It fixes the dependency problem by not installing
either.

> If you have already and it still doesn't work ... I'm out of ideas.


Looks like this is a problem caused by the transition from pulseaudio to
pipewire and KDE on Debian still doesn't have it strightened out.
Thanks for the info.  I'll keep at it.

Augustine