[Solved] No output devices after upgrading to Zorin 18

General Help
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1 
OS: Zorin OS 18.1 x86_64 
Kernel: 7.0.0-42-generic 
DE: GNOME 46.0 
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (12) @ 3.400GH
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Rev. A
Memory: 4008MiB / 40018MiB
HDMI connection to TV Monitor

Hello!

I recently upgraded from Zorin 17 (.4?) to 18 and lost audio output and input. Oddly enough, I do have audio when running some Steam games. The sound setting is showing "no output devices". Audio worked without any issues prior to the upgrade. I've scoured search results for about a week now and I'm unable to find a solution.

So far I've tried:

  • Using alsamixer to set the sound card. I'm able to see HDA Nvidia and HD-Audio Generic in alsamixer, select either card, then update alsa but nothing changes. I also made sure it was not muted.

  • Purged pipewire, pulse audio and alsa-base and installed them again.

  • Updated the system several times throughout the troubleshooting process

  • Rebooted several times

  • Tried rolling back the kernel to the previous version (at this point I was ready to reinstall anyways)

  • Purged and reinstalled PulseAudio Volume Control

There are a few other more in-depth things I tried but I cannot recall what as I've been working on this for about a week, which I apologize for. I did run into some roadblocks which may help explain the issue:

  • PulseAudio Volume control just hangs at "Establishing connection to PulseAudio. Please wait...".

  • systemctl --user status pipewire returns:

pipewire.service - PipeWire Multimedia Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead) since Thu 2026-11-05 15:03:14 CST; 1h 37min ago
   Duration: 19ms
TriggeredBy: ○ pipewire.socket
    Process: 49490 ExecStart=/usr/bin/pipewire (code=killed, signal=SEGV)
   Main PID: 49490 (code=killed, signal=SEGV)
        CPU: 17ms

Nov 05 15:03:14 My-PC systemd[49399]: pipewire.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
Nov 05 15:03:14 My-PC systemd[49399]: pipewire.service: Start request repeated too quickly.

I appreciate any help or advice anyone is able to offer!

Edit:
I did some more digging around and noticed after running pipewire in the console, I was getting two different version outputs:
Compiled with libpipewire 1.0.5
Linked with libpipewire 1.7.0

After some further digging, I found the culprit and removed it:
sudo rm /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpipewire-0.3.so.0.1700.0 followed by sudo ldconfig to update. I then rebooted and when I logged back in, both my output and inputs were showing my hardware and I have audio controls back!

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