In trying to get my microphone to work in Fedora 40 with KDE Plasma, I somehow broke audio playback. Plasma would play it’s startup sound, but then after that, the speaker icon would have a red cross through it like it was muted. Plugging in headphones would unmute, and I could hear the “bonk” sound if I tried to increase or decrease the volume. But soon as I tried to play something, the speaker icon would go back to having the rad cross through it. Checking the setting panel … if I was there when I plugged in the headphone, I would get the regular setting, but if I played a test sound, I would get the error “Error trying to play a test sound. The system said: “Invalid state””. If I went to the setting after I tried to play a sound in another app, I only get the mic setting but no speaker or output setting.
After looking around and trying some different things, I found the answer here: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/upgrade-to-37-no-sound/80888:
dnf remove pulseaudio dnf install pulseaudio plasma-pa dnf install pipewire-pulseaudio alsa-plugins-pulseaudio --allowerasing
Apparently there is a conflict with one of the packages. Both the microphone and the Speakers seem to be working … for the moment …
Linux is great and works well, till it doesn’t 😛