Roots of Pacha - well polished, stress free farming sim. Highly recommended if you like Stardew Valley or Story of Seasons.

I see. Thanks for the explanation. It seems a long standing issue: https://github.com/Maato/volumeicon/issues/49

But the problem is that if you plug in a USB or bluetooth headset, it doesn’t automatically switch to it as the default.

How about module-switch-on-connect?

You may need gtk-murrine-engine (actual package name may differ).

For logging, PANEL_DEBUG=all (source) seems to work. Anyway, did you reboot the system after removing xfce-volumed-pulse (so only xvce-pulseaudio-plugin should be enabled) ?

You don’t need pulseaudio and pipewire at the same time because pipewire provides pulseaudio-compatible server (pipewire-pulse). Also, pipewire usually doesn’t require audio group. Did you follow the official docs or other online guide?

Although I haven’t used Arch for a long time, I guess https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel#Compilation and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel/Arch_build_system will work.

“Pactl load-module” outputs “you have to specify a module name and arguments.”

As I said in earlier comment, please run "pactl load-module module-switch-on-connect" exactly. Note that Pactl and pactl are different commands and the former is invalid.

Is the command different for that?

As the name suggests, pactl is a command for PulseAudio. PipeWire supports application written for PulseAudio, including pactl. Try "man pipewire-pulse" to get further info.

Did you enter the command line (especially load-module) correctly?

It’s not a silly question; I thought it doesn’t matter because PipeWire supports Pulseaudio.

Can you try "pactl load-module module-switch-on-connect"?

I’d try other (lightweight) distros for that case. Since your PC is old, it may not fulfil the latest Ubuntu’s system requirements.

New kernel may introduce regressions. See this similar issue on kernel 6.10.3, or try another version of kernel on startup if it’s possible.