@TLATER Un.Freakin.Believable.
Created new user. Logged in as said user. Sound immediately works. wtf… What possible reason could there be to have audio off by default for root?
What can I run in terminal to confirm I am using Pipewire? Dude, thank you so much for your help, you don’t even know
What possible reason could there be to have audio off by default for root?
As I say, dbus user instance missing 
The root user won’t launch a dbus user instance because well, it’s not intended to be used for such frivolity as desktop applications, and launching one just adds overhead and potential problems; there may well be better reasons hidden in comments somewhere.
To confirm you’re running pipewire, just use pw-cli info all and see if it produces any output, or any other pw- command for that matter.
It sure does!! Brilliant! Woooo ok well thank you once again. Cheers
Hello, I’m having a similar issue but I’m not using as the root user. I have an administrator account that worked fine until I last updated (specifically from Nix0S Vicuna 24.11.717196.9684b53175fc (Linux 6.6.87) to Nix0S Vicuna 24.11.717608.bf3287dac860 (Linux 6.6.88)).
I tried creating a new “regular” user and audio worked straight away. I then “promoted” that user to administrator and audio still worked.
On my account KDE’s volume menu in the system tray doesn’t show any devices anymore and states “Connection to the Sound Service Lost”
I’ve tried:
[dinnerbug@nixos:~]$ systemctl --user status pipewire.service
Failed to get properties: Process org.freedesktop.systemd1 exited with status 1
[dinnerbug@nixos:~]$ ps aux | grep -E ‘pipewire|pulseaudio’
dinnerb+ 10217 0.0 0.0 6796 2688 pts/1 S+ 10:38 0:00 grep -E pipewire|pulseaudio
[dinnerbug@nixos:~]$ systemctl --user restart pipewire
Failed to restart pipewire.service: Process org.freedesktop.systemd1 exited with status 1
See user logs and ‘systemctl --user status pipewire.service’ for details.
I’ve also tried disabling and re-enabling pipewire from configuration.nix. Maybe there’s some config file somewhere that has something wrong written to it?
At a glance, it looks like this user doesn’t have a user dbus, which means that something is very broken.
I’d suggest opening a new thread instead of necroing an ancient one with a clearly unrelated issue. You’re more likely to get responses that way than by replying to a solved post.
Also elaborate on what you mean by “administrator” when you do, there is no such concept in Linux land to my knowledge.
I’m sorry, I made a new thread but it was the second in a row that didn’t get any replies. After a few days of searching everywhere for someone with a similar issue I was getting a little desperate.
I read “administrator” under the account type section in the kde user settings. It should mean I have sudo.
In the end I went for the nuclear option and made a fresh install, thanks for your answer though.
If you’re curious about my issue here’s my thread