11

So I was trying to stop pulseaudio with pulseaudio -k, but it kept restarting "on its own", even though I have the configuration autospawn = no in place.

I'm pretty sure it's systemd that keeps restarting it, as instructed by /usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service: 

[Unit]
Description=Sound Service

[Service]
# Note that notify will only work if --daemonize=no
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
Also=pulseaudio.socket
WantedBy=default.target

But the thing is, when I try to stop this service with systemctl stop pulseaudio.service, systemctl returns me the following:

Failed to stop pulseaudio.service: Unit pulseaudio.service not loaded.

How do I stop/disable this service?

diogovk
  • 458

4 Answers4

16

To stop user services it's necessary to use the parameter --user:

systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service
diogovk
  • 458
2

systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.socket helped me to make it not restart after killing it. changing autospawn and daemon-binary configs didn't help and disabling the service also didn't help.

source: https://winaero.com/blog/disable-pulseaudio-per-user-in-linux/

Also see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/issues/979

sezanzeb
  • 151
0

In the files:
/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.socket
/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service
just below the line:
ConditionUser=!root
add:
ConditionUser=!gdm

That's it!

Mario Galindo
  • 1
0

Even after following all the solutions in this thread and others, pulseaudio kept respawning. It turns out that pavucontrol was bringing it back up automatically, so make sure that application is closed and examine if any other applications might be bringing it back up automatically.

DBedrenko
  • 187