[plasmashell] [Bug 496774] OSD announcing a device change when I connect my headphones using the 3.5mm audio jack shows a "speakers" icon, not a "headphones" icon

[Nate Graham]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496774

Nate Graham <nate at kde.org> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Resolution|---                         |NOT A BUG
             Status|REPORTED                    |RESOLVED

--- Comment #21 from Nate Graham <nate at kde.org> ---
So we have discovered here that when you plug in your headphones to the 3.5mm
audio jack, internally the audio device is actually changed, and this triggers
an OSD, and that OSD has a symbolic icon depicting a speaker rather than a more
appropriate icon depicting headphones.

There are two aspects to this problem:
1. It's inconsistent that an "audio device switched" OSD is shown for this type
of device setup, but not for the type of device setup where plugging something
into the 3.5mm audio jack simply changes the port on the existing device. To
the user, the same thing happened, yet only one of these codepaths shows an
OSD.
2. The icon in the OSD is wrong. You plugged in headphones, but it shows an
icon for a speaker.

The first problem is fixable. We could make it show an OSD for port changes, or
stop showing an OSD for device changes, or stop showing OSDs for
*directly-user-initiated* device changes where the user is likely to not need
the information from the OSD. I couldn't find an existing bug report about just
this, so I opened one: Bug 500348.

The second problem is unfortunately not fixable. When you plug something into
the 3.5mm audio jack, the system has no way to know what it is. It could be a
pair of headphones, or it could be a speaker, or an amplifier, or a
wired-to-Bluetooth adapter, or a toaster oven. The 3.5mm audio cable does not
pass data bidirectionally; there is no way for it to tell them system what kind
of device it's attached to. As such, there is literally no way for the system
to know that what you plugged in is a pair of headphones, and show an
appropriate icon depicting headphones.

So there's nothing we can do here, sorry. It would be best to interpret the
speaker icon you're looking at not as a literal icon for a pair of speakers,
but rather as a symbolic representation of the concepts of sound and audio, as
in "your active audio device changed!"

Hopefully this explanation makes sense.

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