System Sound Volume at 100% Post Install (18.0.8.7 Feedback)

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Installation Details

Version: Kicksecure 18.0.8.7

Install medium: Sandisk USB

Partition format: ext4 (auto-formatted) + LUKS

Bios: Coreboot

Look into how to change it cuz we don’t want users to blow their speakers :exploding_head: :speaker_high_volume:
Not sure what sound backend is used and if they can be set globally to 50% instead of defaulting to 100%

The volume level should be set to 50 to avoid speaker blowout.

(Just so you know I did apt update && apt full-upgrade after install but maybe I’m missing sound drivers?)

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Turned out to be trickier than expected; there isn’t a good existing configuration file for this, and using /etc/xdg/autostart didn’t work since it tried to run pactl for adjusting the speaker volume before pipewire-pulse was actually started (at least, that’s what it seemed like). Got it to work with a user systemd unit:

This might benefit from having a configuration file added to it so the user can customize the default volume.

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Reverted the above change without replacement, because:

  • The systemd unit was crashing in sysmaint sessions, due to trying to adjust the speaker volume too early.
  • Setting the default audio under KVM is difficult due to spice-vdagent automatically setting audio volume inside the VMs to 100% or close to 100%. The host should be the one controlling VM volume anyway, preventing blowing the speakers that way. The only time adjusting VM volume would provide help is if a host is misconfigured (which admittedly can happen, but then other things could break the host’s speakers too).
  • On my end, when booting Kicksecure on physical hardware, the audio volume defaults to 40%. Thus this doesn’t appear to be a concern on at least some physical hardware.

Unless avoiding issues with misconfigured host systems is something we really want to support, or there are some hardware devices where the audio defaults to 100%, I don’t think this is worth it.

@exfil Were you observing the 100% speaker volume on physical hardware, or is this in a VM? If you see it on hardware, there’s an alternate and most likely better solution than the initial one that I can push and test. It will still leave the volume to do whatever it wants inside virtual machines, but it will set the volume on physical systems one time only and let Pipewire remember the volume the rest of the time.

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Physical hardware hence the Install medium: Sandisk USB at the top of my post. I was not aware it was pipeware thanks for clarifying on that. Yeah its just that many others distros last I checked like GNOME and I believe Ubuntu set them less then Full at default then remember that last one user toggles or sets.