Comment # 3 on bug 922401 from Wolfgang Bauer

(In reply to Christian Bachmaier from comment #2)
> > Yes. But openSUSE has a patch for this since 13.1.
> 
> Then the patch did and does not work. As far I can see, there are others
> (Forum-Thread) for which the patch did not help.
AFAICT the patch does work.
At least it did when I last tried to enable PulseAudio here.

But you are right, on some systems the problem seems to occur despite the
patch.

Maybe you raised the volume for notifications in PulseAudio itself?
PulseAudio basically allows a separate volume setting for each application.
You should be able to set the volume for notifications in KMix or pavucontrol.

> Are you really using the package kdebase4-runtime from the distribution?
> 
> Definitively, I am on the distribution version. However, I upgraded my
> system from 12.3 (probably without patch) to 13.1 and then to 13.2 and did
> no clean install inbetween. Could there be some cadaver files or settings
> left over?

Well, the files in /etc/pulse/ are config files, if you ever modified them,
they won't get changed on updates.
But flat-volumes=false, which is the source of this problem, is set by default.

> > - turn off PulseAudio (YaST->Hardware->Sound->Other->PulseAudio
> > Configuration) or uninstall it
> 
> Ok, seems to be rather hard.

Hm? What's hard about that?

> > - set "flat-volumes = no" in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, this will prevent any
> > application from changing the overall volume
> 
> Then my music player cannot make it louder also. Or am I missing something?

Of course it can.
But it cannot change the overall volume.
Why not just try it?
Most people were satisfied afterwards.

> > - you could also set a lower volume in the notifications settings, but that
> > is removed/disabled by openSUSE's patch, but have a look into 
> > ~/.kde4/share/config/knotifyrc and modify the "Volume=" setting to a lower
> > value (I'm not sure whether this has any effect though)
> 
> Would be the best workaround (despite a patch) in my eyes, however, as you
> have suspected, it has no effect.

I thought so. The openSUSE patch actually disabled this setting (so the patch
is indeed working... ;) ).
Do you have the same problem with a fresh user account?
Maybe it's caused by your user's volume settings.

Anyway, this should be fixed upstream in 15.04.
Although IMHO (and I'm not alone in this) this is actually a bug (or at least
unfortunate default settings) in PulseAudio.
But PA upstream thinks differently, and similar openSUSE bugs already got
closed as WONTFIX or FEATURE request by the sound maintainers.
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=800616
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=718728