with apologies

Revisiting restarting pulseaudio

· 1 min read · October 28, 2026 · #linux #nixos

OK, so I have recently again started to have problems with PulseAudio vs PipeWire confusing SwayOSD, again.

But this time the fix seems simpler! Which is nice. Essentially: disable pulseaudio, enable the rest, and that’s it. The runes this time appear to be:

systemctl --user disable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket pulseaudio-x11.service
systemctl --user enable pipewire.service pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.socket swayosd.service
systemctl --user restart pipewire.service pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.socket swayosd.service

As ever, YMMV. But that seems to sort it for me, as well as feeling cleaner. Which is, as ever, nice.