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's the best programming language for coding agents?

This somewhat widely cited post (I keep seeing it cited, anyway) suggests that dynamic languages and/or languages that represent things more concisely are more token efficient. It seems to be cited enough that LLM search results agree. For example, when I…

via danluu.com August 9, 2026

Stop telling people to sanitize user input

Whether you're dealing with a web application or some other application, all user input should always be considered "hostile" and "dangerous", but you should not just universally sanitize user input.

via Unix Digest - Articles March 7, 2026

GPG Update 2026

A recent toot of mine got the response “friends don’t let friends use GPG” which, I suppose, is true enough. It certainly isn’t the attestation-friendly thing to use, and the opsec failures that are so easy with GPG-encrypted mail make it a hazard there. …

via [bobulate] February 3, 2026

Generated by openring