Nix / NixOS
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Yeah doing sound.enable = false fixed it for a little bit, but it's broken again now.
Error is the same as last time. Turns out even the live Nix image can't do audio on this machine. Switched to a Linux distro that actually works. Still would be interesting to find out why this happened.
Well if you ever get back to nixos,
(1) use fwupd to make sure the firmware is up to date (2) seems like you need a kernel param, something like what is here: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/realtek-audio-sound-card-not-recognized-by-pipewire/36637
It's clearly not a UEFI problem when it works fine on another Linux distro. Likewise I don't think it's a needed kernel parameter, because I didn't add anything to CachyOS to make it work, though I will double check the current parameters. It's a fairly standard Intel audio device as well, not anything weird or even that new (tigerlake).
I think this is an issue with how NixOS build their kernel and kernel modules. It's not like it's the only problem I have had with NixOS unfortunately.
NixOS ships a very minimal kernel and relies on you to declare what modules you want to load (or sometimes relies on nixos-generate-hardware to find some of those modules), so even if it is really standard hardware that "just works" on other distros, you still may need to dig out some kernel modules and explicitly load them.
But if CachyOS works for you and makes you comfortable, that is good and you should use it.
However "it worked on other distro X, thus is should work on other distro Y" probably isn't a helpful way of thinking to get things working.
However "it worked on other distro X, thus is should work on other distro Y" probably isn't a helpful way of thinking to get things working.
I am talking about the kernel here. It tells me that the device is actually supported. If something works on other distros driver wise, that means the one it doesn't work on either has an old kernel or is doing something strange.
NixOS ships a very minimal kernel and relies on you to declare what modules you want to load (or sometimes relies on nixos-generate-hardware to find some of those modules), so even if it is really standard hardware that "just works" on other distros, you still may need to dig out some kernel modules and explicitly load them.
That explains it. Still is an odd choice. The whole point of Linux being modular, and knowing how to load stuff automatically, is that shit like this isn't necessary. I can understand if this was Gentoo and we were talking about manually compiling kernels, but this is a pre compiled generic kernel. The expectation is that it just works.
Do you have a source on where to configure these kernel settings?
I tried the stock kernel. It didn't make a difference. I will try disabling sound.enable.