fedora-kde / SIG

#83 GTK apps produce horrible jarring beeps when run on KDE Plasma
Closed: Fixed by ngraham. Opened by ngraham.

Closed: Fixed
Reopen Issue

Open Firefox > Ctrl+F to search > type "ffffffffff" or some other nonsense text that will not match anything

Boom, your speakers will emit a horrendous loud beeping sound, even if you have set the volume very low; it plays unless the speakers are explicitly muted. The sound makes you want to throw the computer out the window and irritates your spouse who's sitting next to you. If you're in a library or a lecture hall, you will annoy and dusturb everyone else in the room, with potential social consequences. If you're wearing earbuds, it can be physically painful. I have personally experienced all of these things happening.

It happens because GTK apps emit the system bell in response to various conditions, and expect the window manager to intercept that signal and instead play a quieter, more pleasant notification sound. GNOME's Mutter does this, but KDE's KWin does not.

There are several ways that this could be fixed:

  1. Have KWin intercept these signals and play a nicer sound like Mutter does. This was vetoed by KWin's former maintainer a few years ago: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381887
  2. Write a small daemon that lives outside of KWin to do the above, or have an existing KDE daemon like kded do it.
  3. Disable the system bell systemwide with echo "blacklist pcspkr" > /etc/modprobe.d/nobeep.conf (this is what Ubuntu does; see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/module-init-tools/+bug/77010)
  4. Make GTK apps no longer emit system bells by setting gtk-error-bell=0 in gtk-{2.0,3.0,4.0}/settings.ini files in ~/.config/ or /etc/

I would prefer option 1 or option 2. Can we bring this up with the current kwin maintainer to see if it could be implemented?

Sure, I can do that soon.

See https://phabricator.kde.org/T14523.

Metadata Update from @ngompa:
- Issue set to the milestone: Future Release
- Issue tagged with: experience

I just found out that there's a PulseAudio module that does this: module-x11-bell. It now exists for PipeWire too, having been released in today's 0.3.44 update.

So I think this is a distro task after all, not a KDE task. It looks like it needs to be configured with the sound file to play, or else it'll play something ugly. A reasonable candidate would be /usr/share/sounds/Oxygen-Sys-App-Message.ogg

Metadata Update from @siosm:
- Issue tagged with: need-info

Is this still happening?

Yes, as to my knowledge no changes were made that would have fixed it

I've booted a default F37 Kinoite installation and I can not reproduce it.

It only happens on X11. The mechanism that causes it is the X11 bell, so naturally that doesn't work on Wayland, and there is no Wayland equivalent

Ah, that explains it.

Metadata Update from @siosm:
- Issue tagged with: xorg

Metadata Update from @siosm:
- Issue set to the milestone: None (was: Future Release)

So I dug into this a bit. It seems like the config file at /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf has the libpipewire-module-x11-bell module unloaded by default. I've submitted a MR for PipeWire to load it by default: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/merge_requests/1375

If that gets merged, we can close this as the fix will trickle down everywhere automatically.

If it's rejected, I would recommend that we make this change ourselves.

@wtaymans, could you please take a look at the upstream PipeWire MR?

So it looks like there's going to be a pipewire-x11 subpackage for this. Unfortunately, if we ship it on the media, we will always have an X server running when we don't need it. We can add it to the plasma-workspace-x11 package when we drop it from the spins.

Just updated from Fedora 35 to Fedora 37, now I hear the bell sound everywhere.
libpipewire-module-x11-bell module of PipeWire is not packaged as a separate package, and there's no easy way to disable its auto-load (as far as I know, Pipewire configuration file does not allow drop-in configuration to disable module loading).

Moreover, I could not disable the sound without unloading libpipewire-module-x11-bell by any means. KDE "Accessibility - Audible bell" doesn't work, Gnome's gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.sound event-sounds false and gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences audible-bell false doesn't work, GTK's gtk-error-bell=0 in GTK2 and GTK3 configuration file also doesn't work (I logged out and logged in after every change).

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2152385

I think that's in fact the intended behavior; GTK apps are very "noisy" with regards to when they play feedback sounds due to UI interaction. The whole idea was for those sounds to be nice, not horrible.

I guess you've run into an edge case in that you blacklisted pcspkr and thereby got no sounds, so you grew accustomed to GTK apps being silent, when they were trying to play sounds all along. So now that the sounds are played without using pcspkr in non-GNOME environments, your previous change no longer causes sounds to be suppressed.

Being able to uninstall the package that's causing this change seems reasonable, which would indeed be a task for https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2152385, not here.

Seems like the original goal here has been accomplished, so I'm closing this ticket now.

Metadata Update from @ngraham:
- Issue close_status updated to: Fixed
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)
Metadata
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experience need-info x11

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