raspi-config is a shell script so you can look in it what it does. I know in the past it failed for me w.r.t. audio on a Pi4B and 3.5mm jack that I used as pulse-audio 'netwerkworked speakers'. Maybe because I did not use PiXeL DE but KDE but not clear. Anyway, you can use systemctl to disable pipewire and enable pulseaudio. I did that for all my Debian installations. New Debian Bookworm installations did not want to discover the networked sinks (the server) on the Pi4, old inplace upgraded installation from Buster->Bullseye>Bookworm were no problem, it kept working.
In new installations paprefs option stay greyed-out.
Now with Trixie still the same issue, but I have more some Debian installs where I need it to work, else buy new audio stuff. So looked deeper into it and it turns out that, as normal user, following command does the trick:
pactl load-module module-zeroconf-discover
Then sinks pop-up in the audio icon in the KDE systemtray. Still paprefs does not work and it does not survive a reboot. So also put it in etc/pulse/default.pa
...
### Network access (may be configured with paprefs, so leave this commented
### here if you plan to use paprefs)
#load-module module-esound-protocol-tcp
#load-module module-native-protocol-tcp
#load-module module-zeroconf-publish
# 2025-11-17 paprefs still greyed-out, so forced add here, else always manually needed via pactl
load-module module-zeroconf-discover
...
I see in my notes of RPi4 about upgrading from RPIOS64 Bullseye to Bookworm that I did this:
sudo apt remove pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user stop pipewire.service
systemctl --user disable pipewire.service
systemctl --user mask pipewire.service
systemctl --user stop pipewire.socket
systemctl --user disable pipewire.socket
systemctl --user mask pipewire.socket
I needed that to be re-done later AFAIR as RPL added bpo12 pipewire to deb12 and it ruined my pulseaudio again.
I see now that in generic Aarch64 or x86-64 Debian Trixie, pipewire is installed but not main system audio (for my systems), so apparently it can now co-exists with pulseaudio. That was always the case in Opensuse Tumbleweed. I see in FireFox audio is 'pulse-rust', not sure what that means.
In new installations paprefs option stay greyed-out.
Now with Trixie still the same issue, but I have more some Debian installs where I need it to work, else buy new audio stuff. So looked deeper into it and it turns out that, as normal user, following command does the trick:
pactl load-module module-zeroconf-discover
Then sinks pop-up in the audio icon in the KDE systemtray. Still paprefs does not work and it does not survive a reboot. So also put it in etc/pulse/default.pa
...
### Network access (may be configured with paprefs, so leave this commented
### here if you plan to use paprefs)
#load-module module-esound-protocol-tcp
#load-module module-native-protocol-tcp
#load-module module-zeroconf-publish
# 2025-11-17 paprefs still greyed-out, so forced add here, else always manually needed via pactl
load-module module-zeroconf-discover
...
I see in my notes of RPi4 about upgrading from RPIOS64 Bullseye to Bookworm that I did this:
sudo apt remove pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user stop pipewire.service
systemctl --user disable pipewire.service
systemctl --user mask pipewire.service
systemctl --user stop pipewire.socket
systemctl --user disable pipewire.socket
systemctl --user mask pipewire.socket
I needed that to be re-done later AFAIR as RPL added bpo12 pipewire to deb12 and it ruined my pulseaudio again.
I see now that in generic Aarch64 or x86-64 Debian Trixie, pipewire is installed but not main system audio (for my systems), so apparently it can now co-exists with pulseaudio. That was always the case in Opensuse Tumbleweed. I see in FireFox audio is 'pulse-rust', not sure what that means.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Tue Nov 18, 2025 7:55 am