How to disable event sounds in Plasma 5

audiokde5notificationsplasma5

I wander how to disable event sounds in kde5 Plasma (the one that is heard when scrolling the volume in systray for example).

I use Plasma in Opensuse 13.2 but this is KDE specific methinks.

UPDATE

These are the available settings (after answer):

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Best Answer

In recent Plasma 5, search "Audio Volume" in the application launcher and, under 'Applications' tab, disable 'Notification Sounds'.

In some Plasma versions the above doesn't work, as I now see in Kubuntu 17.10. The Audio Volume tool looks different and notifications sounds is already muted.

To stop the volume scrolling sound etc in this case, I have unmuted, and moved the slider to zero, and muted again. Something is buggy here though, as the slider is in fact always stuck to zero, and only the mute/unmute button does the work.

In this case I have noticed that a different tool can be used: pavucontrol-qt:

After using this, the bug mentioned (slider stuck to zero in "Audio Volume") disappeared.

Related Solutions

KDE5 After resume from suspend I have corrupted labels under icons

I know your pain, this has been annoying me for months now.

The only way to fix the desktop I've found is brute force, I made a shortcut to do this and run it every time I resume from standby:

killall plasmashell; kstart plasmashell

EDIT: 2020/10/6 - this bug has since been fixed, but for reference: restart command for plasma 5.18.5 is now:

kstart5 plasmashell -- --replace

I can't properly answer this but I'm posting all the info I've got so I can link this from the bug report page. The glitching is a long standing issue with the NVidia drivers and KDE plasma, previously the same question was asked here but it got falsely marked as a duplicate of a similar related issue: https://askubuntu.com/questions/897928/kde-desktop-icons-glitched-after-suspend-kubuntu-16-10

I had some hope after the recent 5.10.3 plasma update as it was supposed to be fixed https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=344326 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Plasma-5.10.3-Released , but it didn't fix the issue for me.
I'm going to follow up on that bug report with a link to this post so also attaching an image of the bug on my system here.

(EDIT: found the actual bug report for Plasma https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382115)

(EDIT2: found the bug report for QT: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-56610 and NVidia forum thread https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/971972/linux/icon-text-label-corruption-with-kde-plasma-5-desktop-folder-view/)

$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 17.04 \n \l
$ uname -a
Linux desktop 4.10.0-26-generic #30-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 27 09:30:12 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ plasmashell --version
plasmashell 5.10.3

Debian – How to hack and modify a predefined date time format of KDE 5 that comes with Debian 9.2.1 Stretch

It took me half a day to (almost) fully investigate this, but I think I found how to do it, and you’re not gonna like it …

The Solution:

In a nutshell,

KDE just uses QT’s QLocale. Which itself uses hard-coded data inside qlocale_data_p.h, deep in QT’s core library code.

This data is apparently manually generated from the Unicode Consortium’s “Common Locale Data Repository”, using several Python scripts inside util/local_database/ of the QT source code package. Which itself is not even part of the source code, I am certain. Let alone, using any kind of configuration or data files on your computer.

So the only way to do this, is to …

Download the CLDR files, either as a package, at http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/latest/core.zip (or cldr-common-*.zip, they both seem to contain the same), or at https://www.unicode.org/repos/cldr/trunk/, and extract the XML files under common/main/.
Gentoo also has a package called app-i18n/unicode-cldr btw.
Acquire the QT core source code, e.g. from your distribution’s repository, and unpack it.
Use the scripts in util/local_database/ (like cldr2qlocalexml.py and qlocalexml2cpp.py), with your language of choice’s XML file, to re-generate the static qlocale_data_p.h.
Then compile and install the package as normal.

And don’t forget to recompile all other packages that include qlocale_data_p.h.

Or, on Gentoo, make a lasting patch with:

ebuild $(equery w dev-qt/qtcore:5) prepare
pushd /var/tmp/portage/dev-qt/qtcore-5*/work/ # assuming default Portage build directory
mv qtbase-opensource-src-5.9.3 a
cp -a a b

NOW make the above changes in b, and not in a.

mkdir -p /etc/portage/patches/dev-qt/$(basename $(dirname $(pwd))) # only for this version
#mkdir -p /etc/portage/patches/dev-qt/qtcore # for all versions
diff -ur a b > /etc/portage/patches/dev-qt/qtcore*/my-locale.patch
rm -rf a b
popd
ebuild $(equery w dev-qt/qtcore:5) clean
# Rebuild all packages that depend on it, just to be sure. May be optional.
emerge -1 dev-qt/qtcore:5 $(equery d dev-qt/qtcore:5 | sed 's/^/=/')

Final thoughts

To be perfectly frank, I didn’t check if those Python scripts actually worked by just passing an XML file. As, at that point, I just stopped bothering, and wanted to kill it with fire. :)

If anyone wants to actually do it in practice, please report, and I will update this answer. (Or do it yourself, if you can)

Here’s how I got there:

I opened KDE’s time formats setting dialog, via right-click on the task bar clock.
Then, with htop I found the most recently started processes, which included the obvious kcmshell5 formats.
Using htop’s list open files feature on it, I filtered for “format”, and found /usr/lib64/qt5/plugins/kcm_formats.so.
With the help of Gentoo’s equery belongs /usr/lib64/qt5/plugins/kcm_formats.so I could identify the package kde-plasma/plasma-desktop.
After unpacking its source file, I quickly found kcms/formats/kcmformats.cpp, whose addLocaleToCombo used the QLocale, and included <QLocale> too.
This QLocale could then be found with locate -i QLocale to reside at /usr/include/qt[5]/QtCore/qlocale.h. It included some generated enumerations of the languages, scripts, etc.
Another equery belongs /usr/include/qt[5]/QtCore/qlocale.h pointing me to dev-qt/qtcore/qtcore, and unpacking the source file later…
… I already had a gut feeling, that it was all generated with some tool. So I looked into util/ and found util/local_database/README stating “local_database is used to generate qlocale data from the Common Locale Data Repository (The database for localized names (like date formats, country names etc)).”.
Having never heard of that, I looked it up, and it’s apparently by the Unicode Consortium. The code of cldr2qlocalexml.py was not very useful though, as it is called with the path to a directory containing the CLDR locales. Its result is used for qlocalexml2cpp.py though, which generates the file src/corelib/tools/qlocale_data_p.h, which includes huge hard-coded tables of all the locale data. And that file already existed in the source. So… yep, it’s (partially?) hard-coded.
But the CLDR XML files were nowhere to be found. So I assume it just uses the previously prepared qlocale_data_p.h. Which is not very in the spirit of open source. But at least you can do it yourself, as described above.