Inconsistent Fedora 35 audio problem

Question

I have a really strange audio problem on my Fedora distro (Fedora 35 Workstation Edition), installed on my laptop.

Previously I used Windows 10 on my laptop, and I had no audio problem whatsoever. Then I installed Fedora, and after approximately one month I stared having the following symptoms: Some days, not all days, just some days, the audio output simply stops working. Completely mute. No speakers, no headset, no nothing. The volume indicator on the top right side of the screen drops to zero on its own. I can bring the volume slider back up, but the audio still does not work, and when I connect a new audio device, such as headsets, the system volume drops back to zero; but rising it manually has again no effect, still no sound. Sometimes restarting the machine fixes the problem, sometimes it does not! And it takes more than one restart. Sometimes it happens when I put a video on pause, sometimes it happens at startup. Some days the audio works like a charm.

What is going on???

I cannot find anything online to help me fix this. I have tried killing and then starting pulseaudio back up. I have tried re-installing pulse audio. I have tried everything but nothing seems to work!

Should I re-install Fedora from scratch? I would really like not doing that.. There has to be a way to find out what is going on and fix this!

Creepy... don't be so mellodramatic. Run `pavucontrol` and check what is enabled and the default. — Bib, Jan 22 '22 at 11:40
Does audio still work in Windows? If it does that could indicate that the new installed kernel has an audio related regression which is all too often in the Linux world. — Artem S. Tashkinov, Jan 22 '22 at 17:23

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 23 '22 at 10:03

I found the solution, thanks to this other answer! Turns out you just need to execute the following in terminal:

sudo dnf swap --allowerasing pulseaudio pipewire-pulseaudio

Problem gone!

Seems like it was a problem with Pipewire, I have really no idea why a bug like this is present in Fedora 35.. I have read online that Pipewire seems not ready to be implemented on a full scale on Fedora. Still somebody should really do something about this, I spent weeks before finding this solution.. And I am also not sure why I encountered this problem while so many other users do not face any problem at all with their audio on Fedora.

In any case I hope this answer will be useful to others, spear them some of the hassle I had to put up with.

Being Linux, it is useful to point out that a cold system restart was needed. — dmvianna, Mar 15 '22 at 23:18

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 27 '22 at 12:41

WARNING: This solution does not work on Fedora 36!

I use a Lenovo V110 laptop with Fedora 35 Workstation. First run:

sudo dnf swap --allowerasing pulseaudio pipewire-pulsaudio.

The shell tells me that I don't have pulseaudio installed and that I have pipewire-pulsaudio.

I try to install pulseaudio with:

sudo dnf install pulseaudio.

The shell tells me that there is a package conflict with pipewire-pulsaudio and that I should use the --allowerasing option to uninstall the conflicting package, i.e. pipewire-pulsaudio.

I install pulseaudio with:

sudo dnf install --allowerasing pulseaudio.

I restart the system and so far so good, the system recognizes the headphones.

Inconsistent Fedora 35 audio problem

2 Answers2