[arch-general] pulseaudio, systemd --user and session problems

[Maarten de Vries]

On 21 October 2015 at 14:57, Karsten Rode <karsten.rode at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a problem I think is related to the startup of a systemd user
> session.  I noticed lately that pulseaudio does not automatically start,
> although I can start it form the command line later with
>
> $ pulseaudio --start
>
> After digging around I found that pulseaudio should be started by the
> systemd user session,
> ​[...]
>
>
​Unless this changed, pulseaudio is started automatically by libpulse when
a client needs the daemon. This can be controlled​

​by the autospawn option in /etc/pulse/client.conf or
~/.config/pulse/client.conf (see man pulse-client.conf).​

You could disable autospawn there (even if it seems to be broken already)
and use systemd user sessions. For that you would have to enable either the
pulseaudio.service or pulseaudio.socket unit in your user session
(systemctl --user enable ....).

Either way, normally it should just work without systemd user sessions. So
if you didn't change the autospawn setting something seems to be broken.
Keep in mind that libpulse also delays starting the daemon until someone
tries to use it. So maybe you're just observing this.

-- Maarten