On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 11:03:55AM -0500, Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote: > What I'm not clear on at this point is why the instance of it that's started > by the system doesn't seem to work, while the one that I start manually at > some point later on does.
Pulse Audio is still quite mysterious to me as well. In fact, I have the exact opposite experience: if I start Pulse Audio from my .xsession file (the way I expected it should be done), that one always fails to work. Consistently. 100%, every time. Killing it and restarting it always gave a working instance. Again, 100%, every time. But if I let it start itself automatically on demand, then it works straight out of the gate with no issues. So far, anyway! This is with Debian 11 (and, I think, 'twas the same on version 10 as well), starting X with "startx" from a console, with fvwm and no desktop environment. The symptom of the non-working Pulse Audio was a complete lack of response to everything. Running "pavucontrol" would give me some message about not being able to contact the daemon, but I could see it running in "ps". Kill, restart, pavucontrol again, and it was all happy. Sadly, I don't know enough to offer any helpful advice. All I can give you are some questions that you might ask yourself to try to gather more information about the issue: What version of Debian? How do you log in? How do you start your graphical session, if you use one? Which graphical session, if any, are you using? How does Pulse Audio get started (if you know)? What do you see in "ps"? What are the exact symptoms? Are there any error messages? If so, what do they say, and how do you see them? What steps do you perform when you restart Pulse Audio? What does "ps" show after that? The answers to those might help someone else help you. We can hope, anyway.
