Audio on Omarchy Linux

Audio on Omarchy is stock Arch audio. PipeWire, WirePlumber and pipewire-pulse do the work, and Omarchy adds a thin layer of hardware hooks and CLI helpers on top. For ordinary hardware there is nothing Omarchy-specific in the path. The failures cluster in a few predictable places, and the list below comes from the 267 audio-tagged issues in the tracker plus the v4.0.4 source tree.

Status on 4.0.4

Omarchy ships no audio configuration of its own for ordinary HDA codecs, USB DACs and headsets, HDMI and DisplayPort output, or Bluetooth A2DP. On that hardware you get stock Arch PipeWire behaviour plus the WirePlumber A2DP auto-connect rule that arrived in 3.8.0.

Reliably rough: Intel SoundWire laptops whose machine driver the kernel does not yet match, laptops whose smart amplifier is driven by a separate chip such as TAS2781 or CS35L56, Bluetooth HFP microphones, and Apple hardware older than the T2 era.

New on 4.0.4 and worth knowing: the release made the bespoke linux-omarchy kernel the default boot entry for everyone. Two audio regressions filed the day after it shipped both disappear when the reporter boots the stock Arch linux kernel from the Limine menu instead. If your sound changed on 15 or 16 September 2026, that is the first thing to test.

What Omarchy does automatically

The root-side hooks live in install/hardware/ and run through omarchy-apply-hardware when the ISO is finalized; the per-user ones live in install/user/hardware/ and run from omarchy-finalize-user. A regular omarchy-update does not rerun them. A fix that lands after your install reaches you only when it also ships as a migration, which is how the wider sof-firmware check got to existing machines in 3.8.3.

• Intel SOF firmware. install/hardware/intel/sof-firmware.sh calls omarchy-hw-intel-sof, which just looks for an Intel audio controller in lspci. If one is there, sof-firmware is installed. The script’s own comment is blunt about why: without that firmware the sof-audio-pci-intel-* drivers give you a Dummy Output and nothing else. This hook arrived in 3.8.0 for Panther Lake and was widened in 3.8.3 to Arrow Lake, Meteor Lake and Wildcat Lake.
• ASUS ROG soft mixer. install/user/hardware/asus/fix-audio-mixer.sh copies alsa-soft-mixer.conf into your WirePlumber config, wipes the saved default routes, and sets Master to 80 percent unmuted on an ALC285 card. A companion script drops Internal Mic Boost to zero and sets capture to 70 percent, because the default boost clips.
• Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 bass. install/hardware/lenovo/fix-yoga-pro7-bass-speakers.sh matches the DMI string Yoga Pro 7 14IAH10 and writes a modprobe option pinning the ALC287 to the alc287-yoga9-bass-spk-pin model, so both amplifier speakers get signal.
• Framework 13 AMD input. fix-f13-amd-audio-input.sh sets the AMD card profile to the HiFi variant that exposes both microphones plus the speaker.
• Speaker tunings. On a match, install/hardware/speaker-tuning.sh pulls in lsp-plugins-lv2, and at first login omarchy audio tuning on installs a PipeWire filter chain in front of the internal speaker sink. Only the 2026 Dell XPS 14 and XPS 16 ship one today, matched on DMI product SKU 0DB9 and 0DBA. The XPS 14 profile was measured, the XPS 16 is covered on report only, and the config file says so.

The tuning runs as its own PipeWire client under omarchy-speaker-tuning.service rather than inside the daemon, so switching it does not drop every PulseAudio client. If the tuning sink fails to appear, or links to the wrong sink, the script removes itself and leaves your audio untouched.

You also get the Quickshell audio panel on SUPER + CTRL + A, volume keys routed through omarchy-audio-output-volume, output rotation on SHIFT + XF86AudioMute, and omarchy-restart-audio wired into the menu at Update, Hardware, Audio.

Known problems

Known issues

Issue	Models	Status	Fixed in
#6952 shell segfaults when PipeWire nodes vanish	Any, triggered by USB DACs, AirPods on AAC, WirePlumber restarts	open	not yet
#4821, #4801 soft mixer leaves ALC285 hardware controls muted	ASUS ROG Strix and Zephyrus G14, G16, G17, Flow	open, workaround known	not yet
#5557 sof_sdw fails to instantiate the card	ASUS Zenbook S14 UX5406AA	open, needs upstream kernel patches	not yet
#12086 TAS2781 amplifier does not bind to the HDA codec at boot	Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IRX8H	open	not yet
#12008 CS4208 speakers silent, needs driver plus EFI chime un-mute	MacBook9,1 and 10,1	open	not yet
#12131 constant HDMI audio underruns on the Omarchy kernel	MacBookPro11,2 Haswell	open	not yet
#12188 USB speaker loses volume headroom on the Omarchy kernel	Dell XPS 14 DA14260	open	not yet
#12204 volume keys act on easyeffects_sink, not the speakers	Any machine running EasyEffects	open	not yet
#12191 fronted-sink ignores community tuning sinks	Desktops using a third-party calibrator plugin	open	not yet
#12113 Bluetooth HFP microphone records silence	OnePlus Bullets Wireless Z2, JBL Tune 770NC	open	not yet
#12047 USB microphone detected but capture clock stays at zero	Blue Yeti 046d:0ab7	open, workaround known	not yet
#1818 Bluetooth headsets connect but never appear as sinks	Sony XM5, AirPods Pro 2 and others	closed May 2026	3.8.0

Two patterns dominate. The first is the ASUS ROG one. Omarchy’s own soft-mixer rule stops PipeWire from touching ALSA hardware controls, and on the ALC285 the kernel’s jack detection keeps resetting Headphone Playback Switch to off. Nothing then unmutes it. The rule exists to avoid other Realtek volume quirks, so it helps some machines and silences others.

The second is the smart amplifier problem. CS35L56 on SoundWire and TAS2781 over I2C both need the right machine description, firmware and topology before the speakers make any noise at all. On the Zenbook S14 the log shows sof_sdw sof_sdw: ASoC: failed to instantiate card -22 and aplay -l reports no soundcards. Pegorim built a kernel with two upstream SOF patches and got speakers, jack, microphone and HDMI all working, which pins the cause outside Omarchy.

The Bluetooth sink problem in #1818 closed when #5336 added a WirePlumber rule that auto-connects the A2DP sink and source profiles. It merged on 7 May 2026 and shipped two days later in 3.8.0, which is why it is the only row above with a version.

The Quickshell crash in #6952 is not a sound failure but it looks like one, because the bar disappears when a USB DAC or a Bluetooth headset re-registers. Several reporters traced it to the audio panel holding live PipeWire node objects that go null underneath it.

Fixes that work

Try these in order. Stop when sound comes back.

1. omarchy-restart-audio. It restarts WirePlumber, PipeWire and pipewire-pulse, and if wpctl is still unresponsive it looks for a USB audio device stuck in SETUP state and resets it with usbreset. This clears most “it worked an hour ago” cases.
2. Check the real hardware mixer, not the PipeWire one. amixer -c <n> contents; alsa-utils is in the base package set. PipeWire can report 30 percent volume and no mute while Master Playback Switch is off underneath.
3. On an ASUS ROG laptop, remove the soft-mixer file: rm ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/alsa-soft-mixer.conf and restart audio. Reporters on the Strix G16, Zephyrus G14, G16, M16 and Flow X13 confirmed it in #4821, and the Strix G17 reporter in #4801 got the same result by moving the whole WirePlumber config aside.
4. If you only have a Dummy Output, check journalctl -b -k | grep -iE 'sof|snd'. A missing sof-firmware package is a one-line fix. A failed to instantiate card -22 is not, and means waiting on a kernel.
5. Since 4.0.4, boot the stock Arch linux kernel once from the Limine menu and test again. Distortion, underruns and lost volume headroom on the linux-omarchy build have all been reported this way.
6. If a speaker tuning is active and the sound is wrong rather than absent, omarchy audio tuning status shows what matched and omarchy audio tuning off reverts you to raw speakers.
7. For a virtual sink, remember that omarchy-audio-output-sink resolves through it. With EasyEffects that resolution currently fails, so set the hardware sink volume directly with pactl set-sink-volume.

On 3.x the picture differs in two places: the bar was Waybar and there was no audio panel, since SUPER + CTRL + A arrived with 4.0.0, and speaker tunings did not exist before 4.0.0. The SOF firmware hook and the ASUS mixer scripts both predate 4.0 and behave the same.

Report it

Run omarchy debug. It writes /tmp/omarchy-debug.log with inxi -Farz, dmesg, the current boot’s warnings and errors from the journal, and your full package list. Attach that.

Add the audio specifics the debug log does not spell out: wpctl status, pactl list sinks, aplay -l, cat /proc/asound/cards, and journalctl -b -k | grep -iE 'sof|snd_hda|cs35l|tas27'. Name the codec and its subsystem ID, because fixes are keyed on the PCI SSID. Say which kernel you booted, linux-omarchy or stock Arch linux, and whether the other one behaves differently. That A/B result is the most useful single line in an audio report right now.

Related

• No sound from laptop speakers
• Bluetooth stops after resume
• Quickshell crashes or bar missing
• Bluetooth
• T2 Macs
• ASUS ROG Zephyrus
• Dell XPS 14 (2026)
• Lenovo Legion
• omarchy-restart-audio
• omarchy-audio-tuning
• Omarchy 4.0.4
• Submit your hardware report