Kinda a frustrating issue I have here. Essentially, I’m just trying to use some wired headphones on this OS but I’m having some trouble because it will recognize when something is plugged into my laptop’s 3.5mm audio jack and then automatically switch to what it will label as headphones and say that it is outputting audio from them when audio is playing, but I hear no audio. The laptop speakers work fine otherwise.
I’ve used these headphones with this same cable on other devices and it’s worked fine and I’ve even plugged in a different pair of headphones and it still didn’t work. As far as I can tell, nothing will really acknowledge specifically what headphones the other end of the 3.5mm jack are plugged into. Have seen others with this issue in forums over the years, yet no answers. Anyone think they can help with this? I’d really appreciate it as this has been pretty annoying to try and find anything for.
KDE gui btw.
[EDIT: Issue has been fixed by disabling SOF and using the legacy snd_hda_intel drivers.
On Samsung laptops with the Realtek ALC256 codec (like my Galaxy Book 730QDA), Fedora and other modern Linux systems load Intel’s SOF (Sound Open Firmware) driver by default. That driver often misroutes the 3.5 mm headphone jack, so audio appears active but is silent. The fix is to disable SOF and use the legacy snd_hda_intel driver, which supports Realtek’s model-specific quirks. To do this, add
snd_intel_dspcfg.dsp_driver=1
to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line in /etc/default/grub, rebuild GRUB (sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg), and reboot. Optionally, add
options snd-hda-intel model=alc256-samsung-headphone
to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf so the driver applies Samsung’s routing fix. After reboot, wired headphone audio works normally.)