I installed Fedora 35 on my desktop system this past week following the release this week. I thought it would be a benign activity since I've been dnf system-upgrade in place for years now without much ado. Things changed this time,though.
The change to wireplumber for this release had some side effects regarding my HDMI sound output. I have two monitors and one TV all for my displays. I don't have a dedicated sound card in my machine, so I use audio through the output via Intel or Radeon HDMI output. This had been working perfectly in Fedora 34. The upgrade, however, seemed to bork the sound settings completely. My choice in the Setting control panel kept switching to Dummy Output. When I tried to test my speakers, there was no sound. Then when I tried to switch the device to one of the listed HDMI options, the ability to test speakers didn't include speakers to click.
Of course, I hit the IRC support channel and posed my dilemma. ledeni walked me through a few things to try to get more information about what might be missing or misconfigured. After all the effort, I still didn't have sound. One of the things suggested was this addition and a post reboot:
$ echo "options snd-hda-intel model=generic" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
Although it didn't work at the time, it remains in effect. And it might still be part of the solution, but what I ended up doing this morning was the following:
$ sudo dnf swap pulseaudio pipewire-media-session --allowerasing
$ sudo dnf swap pipewire-media-session wireplumber
Then rebooted to find devices discovered. I found the HDMI for the TV and tested the sound successfully.
I'm documenting this for anyone else who might have similar problems. Oh, there is a suggested default answer as the first attempt to get sound working. It is this:
$ systemctl --user enable --now wireplumber
That is also running and active as part of my working configuration.
