I was having some issues in openSUSE Tumbleweed where my audio devices would continue to be listed after being disconnected. My audio applet in KDE Plasma was looking like an incredible mess and it was making conducting remote meetings problematic. Microsoft Teams is already an audio mess on any operating system, the Linux desktop shouldn’t make it any more of a mess. I did make a post on the openSUSE forum.
https://forums.opensuse.org/t/audio-devices-remain-after-disconnect-on-plasma-5-27/168398
I was linked to a an issue on GitLab about it so it was already being addressed. The good news here is that I was given a new tool that I can refer back to, should there be another regression.
Instead of logging out and back in again, the fix for cleaning up the mess of dead audio devices was to run a little command in the terminal:
systemctl --user restart pipewire.service This made everything right again and I could conduct my meetings as I had been. It should be noted that as of the writing of this article, the issue causing this has been fixed so it is no longer an issue.
Final Thoughts
Linux isn’t perfect and as much as I do enjoy all that the openSUSE project creates, neither is openSUSE and that is okay. Sometimes, when pushing the experience forward, things happen. That is just the way it goes. Thankfully, there are workarounds and fixes for these problems when they do arise. It’s all part of the fun.
References
https://forums.opensuse.org/t/audio-devices-remain-after-disconnect-on-plasma-5-27/168398
https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/v3g2w9/is_there_a_cli_command_to_restart_pipewire/
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