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).

Articles from blogs I follow:

What if one of your online friends dies unexpectedly?

A lot of people experience online friends "vanishing" without notice. A new nonprofit project tries to help prevent this issue.

via unixdigest.com January 10, 2025

Calamares towards 3.3.11

I’m going to change up the Calamares release process a little. It’s been slow going as a community-maintained project – which isn’t to say that that is a bad thing. Just slow. I’ve decided to make releases marginally more predictable than “when [ade] has …

via [bobulate] October 24, 2024

Signing Android Apps Using a YubiKey (on NixOS)

In my spare time, I currently develop two Android apps using Flutter: AniTrack, a simple anime and manga tracker based on my own needs, and Moxxy, a modern XMPP client. While I don't provide release builds for AniTrack, I do for Moxxy. Those are signed u…

via PapaTutuWawa's Blog July 24, 2023

Generated by openring