Pulseaudio not working kernel driver broken

Solution 1:

It seems that removing and reinstalling pulseaudio fixes this problem for some people. However, the only methods I have seen are quite destructive as many packages depend on pulseaudio. To circumvent the dependency issue, we can purge pulseaudio using dpkg instead of apt.

First, run the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo dpkg -P --force-all pulseaudio
sudo rm -r ~/.pulse ~/.asound* ~/.pulse-cookie ~/.config/pulse

_{If you get an error at the last step, ignore the error.}

Next, reinstall and restart ALSA and pulseaudio:

sudo apt install --reinstall -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confmiss" pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload
systemctl --user restart pulseaudio

Finally, you can check the status of pulseaudio with the following command:

systemctl --user status pulseaudio

It should return as "loaded" and "active". If not, reboot and check the status again.