Disabling sound on KDE/Qt notifications / alerts with ALSA
I am using ALSA for my system sound and I am trying to keep away from PulseAudio and PipeWire things. I do not like them that. I know they provide a way to disable the system sound, just open PavuControl and mute the “System Sounds” channel and done.
For ALSA I did not manage to find such a simple way to do it. I also did not find a way to disable it in KDE or Qt configuration files (or I did not search hard enough).
In the end, I resulted in a brute force approach and deleted files and made sure they will not be installed again. So how to do that? I use Artix linux and it is simple.
Open /etc/pacman.conf and add/edit it like this:
NoExtract = usr/share/sounds/Oxygen*
The sounds are provided by package oxygen-sounds and it updates
frequently and is a dependency with a VERSION for other KDE packages.
This means I cannot ignore it or mark it as installed since other
packages will request it at the specified version (greets KDE Gear).
By deleting the files provided by this package from
/usr/share/sounds the sound will be gone and I will have my silence.
Now I have to ensure that the package is being installed and updated
properly by pacman and the sound files are not provided/extracted by
it. This can be achieved by the NoExtract option in pacman.conf as
said before.
PS: This is note for myself if I need it again (needed it twice already and always had to do a full research).