I recently installed Leap 16 on a computer with an Nvidia GT710 card. I soon realized that, although video worked well, I got no sound over HDMI. The sound applet in the notification area (KDE) showed the device but when I went to test it I would get anywhere from silence to a pop, or rarely a complete “Front Channel Left” announcement, and no sound was produced from any applications. After much trial and error and head-scratching, I found that if I disabled pipewire and reverted to pulseaudio the sound then worked.
A minor drawback, however, was that the sound icon in the notification area was gone and the “Sound” entry under “Input & Output” in the System Settings applet was gone.
Since I would rather have sound and no applet rather than an applet and no sound, I can live with this. But I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions about how to bring those settings applets back.
This is all with the ‘nouveau’ driver. I tried installing the nVidia driver but it won’t load, probably because the card is too old.
In addition, the “Sound” applet correctly identifies an “HDMI Display Port” and offers several speaker configurations (Stereo, 5.1, 7.1). Alsamixer does not report any muted channels.
So it appears that the device is recognized but pipewire does not send the sound signal out properly.
I tried
nouveau.config=NvClkMode=auto
but this seemed to have no effect.
The fact that I get sound out of pulseaudio indicates that the problem is not with the nouveau driver but with pipewire. I am not sure how or where to submit a bug report.
I cannot be the only one out here using Leap 16 with a nVidia GT710 video card but I have not seen any other reports of a similar problem. Maybe it is something unique about my setup.