Hi Christoph, Sorry for the long delay. This is a deliberate change in muffin, and it is not specific to Debian.
In muffin 4.8 (bullseye) the window manager only subscribed to XKB bell events and left the X server's audible bell alone, so the pcspkr beep kept working. Since muffin 5.x (bookworm) the code follows mutter anddisables it explicitly — XkbChangeEnabledControls(..., XkbAudibleBellMask, 0)
in src/x11/meta-x11-display.c — because the window manager now intends to play the bell itself. It only does so when the audible-bell key is set, and that key defaults to false, so nothing is played and the hardware beep is gone: silence. You can get a bell sound back by enabling "Enable audio alerts" in System Settings > Accessibility, or equivalently: gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.wm.preferences audible-bell true muffin then plays /usr/share/cinnamon/sounds/bell.ogg (from cinnamon-common); the sound file is selectable in the same settings page. This does not bring back the pcspkr beep, which stays disabled by the window manager for the whole session. The code is in muffin and is unchanged in current versions, so I'm reassigning the bug there and forwarding it upstream: muffin has a fallback that would force the classic bell when playing the sound fails (XkbForceDeviceBell in src/x11/events.c), but it never triggers, because bell_audible_notify() always reports success and is only reached when audible-bell is already true.
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