No sound after upgrade

Problem

Sound isn’t working after upgrade to Fedora Linux 35.

There are two possible known causes for this, with different solutions.

  1. In some cases, the new WirePlumber service may not be properly configured to start automatically after an upgrade. WirePlumber is a session manager for PipeWire, the modern audio subsystem we made the default starting with Fedora 34. You can read those links for details, but the short version is “this needs to be running for sound to work”.

  2. In other cases, WirePlumber may be running, but you still don’t have sound. In that case, see below.

Situation 1: Wireplumber not running

If systemctl --user status wireplumber.service — run as regular user, not root — says “disabled” and “inactive”, this is likely your problem. The upgrade process should have taken care of this, and we expect this to be true for almost everyone.

Workaround

If this did not happen properly when your system was upgraded, run the following command AS YOUR REGULAR USER from a terminal ( not as root or with sudo ), and everything should start working:

systemctl --user enable --now wireplumber

Situation 2: Pulseaudio still in use

There is another potential cause of sound not working after upgrade to Fedora 35. If wireplumber.service is enabled and running, but you still do not have sound, run the following command (as regular user, not as root):

systemctl --user status session.slice

if it shows all three of pipewire.service, pulseaudio.service and wireplumber.service running, like this:

        ├─pipewire.service
        │ └─4071 /usr/bin/pipewire
        ├─pulseaudio.service
        │ ├─12324 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no --log-target=journal
        │ └─12391 /usr/libexec/pulse/gsettings-helper
        └─wireplumber.service
          └─4072 /usr/bin/wireplumber

then this may be the problem: it appears this configuration does not work, either some or all of the time. This case may result if you manually switched back to pulseaudio from wireplumber in Fedora 34, or possibly may occur on systems which have been upgraded constantly from an older release.

Workaround

Try switching fully to pipewire, with this command:

sudo dnf swap --allowerasing pulseaudio pipewire-pulseaudio

If that still does not work, as a last resort, you may try to switch back to pulseaudio, but remove wireplumber and pipewire.

Related Issues

Bugzilla report: #2016253

Solution

None yet, other than the workarounds.

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An update was been released as an attempt fix this issue, but that update does not seem to have covered all situations. If you don’t have sound, even on a fully-updated system, try the workarounds listed above.

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