No sound after unplugging the headphones from the computer

I have an issue with my sound system.

Whenever I start my freshly installed Ubuntu 20.04 machine, the sound works just fine. When I plug the headphones, the sound switches to the headphones with no delay, everything perfect so far.

The problem starts when I unplug the headphones: I can hear nothing!

Plugging the headphones again works, the sound will once again be in the headphones, but no sound on the speakers whatsoever.

I checked the sound output device in the 'Sound' menu, the speakers get auto-selected when I unplug the headphones and I can even see the sound intensity on that bar made of green dots. (don't know how it's called).

My machine is a HP Zbook G5 Studio.

Let me know if any of you has any possible solutions.

3 Answers

Running

mv ~/.config/pulse/ ~/.config/pulse_old/

and restarting my machine did the trick.

I'm also on a HP Zbook G5 Studio and what worked for me was following these steps:

1. Uninstall pulseaudio using: $ sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio alsa-base
2. Reboot, now there won't be any sound info since there is no driver, but don't worry.
3. Install pulseaudio again: $ sudo apt-get install pulseaudio alsa-base
4. Reboot again and it should be fine, at least it was for me.

I should also note that I did this process after updating from Ubuntu 20.04 to 21.04

The only trick that works for me currently is to Suspend and Wakeup the Laptop.