I’m running Manjaro with Plasma on my laptop, and I keep hearing some notification sound at regular intervals, but have no idea which process might be playing it, or why.
The first time in any desktop session when I hear it, is right after entering the password, before the desktop is even visible.
I’ve been through the notification settings in Plasma, and the sound persists even if I turn audio notifications off completely, or set notification volume to zero. It also keeps going when I lock the desktop session but keep the laptop running, even after the screen goes dark.
This started about two to three weeks ago, but I can’t say when exactly or what changed at the time, because I had Plasma muted for a while, so I would not have noticed immediately when it started. It’s been persistent over the past few software updates.
I tried keeping the Plasma volume widget open to see which applications are playing sound, but nothing shows up when I hear the sound effect.
I’ve gone through the /user/share/sounds/
folder, and found that ./freedesktop/stereo/bell.oga
seems to correspond closest to the sound I’m hearing, but it does sound a little distorted, so it might not be exactly that file being played.
At least when I set volume to zero in plasma (or mute the sound) does the sound also go away, and it does seem to follow the volume setting. It also always plays on the main audio device, even if some applications don’t always do this correctly.
Where else can I look to figure out what is going on, and of course: how can I get rid of this? As long as the laptop is not muted, this notification sound is overlaid with anything that plays, several times per minute.
Some info about the system:
Kernel: 5.10.141-1-MANJARO x86_64
Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 5.25.5
~ >>> inxi --audio
Audio:
Device-1: Intel Comet Lake PCH-LP cAVS driver: sof-audio-pci
Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.10.141-1-MANJARO running: yes
Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 16.1 running: yes
Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.57 running: yes
of I’m not quite sure what kind of other information would be useful here (and where to find it – I’m not too familiar with where everything is in Manjaro), so please let me know if there’s something relevant missing.