Comment # 5 on bug 1082123 from Noah Davis

(In reply to Takashi Iwai from comment #4)
> Is this a regression from older versions?
> 
> I thought we already disabled the flat volume for avoiding this kind of
> problem.
> Let me check...  /etc/pulse/daemon.conf.d/disable_flat_volumes.conf is there.
> Isn't it any longer effective?
> 
> BTW, does the problem happen on other DEs?

It has been a problem since late 2017, but I could never find the cause of the
problem.

I'm not sure what flat volume is, but it seems like it should be disabled for
me as well.

    $ cat /etc/pulse/daemon.conf.d/disable_flat_volumes.conf
    # Set flat-volumes to no so that no applications can abruptedly increase
master volume
    # Remedy for fate#310668.
    flat-volumes = no

I couldn't reproduce the problem inside an openSUSE Tumbleweed virtual machine
with KDE Plasma, Xfce and GNOME via virt-manager. I used the snapshot 20180221
DVD ISO. I only tested Minitube and SMTube because I don't think my laptop can
handle a virtual machine within a virtual machine.

I'm not willing to risk introducing instability to my system by adding other
desktop environments. Maybe in the future I can try something. I did try to
reproduce the bug in IceWM, but it seems a lot of things aren't working in
IceWM. Pulseaudio has to be restarted in order to work and it can't connect to
the internet. I was able to reproduce the QEMU/virt-manager bug in IceWM
though.

The QEMU/virt-manager bug also seems to mess with panning sometimes.
Occasionally, when I change my system volume, the sound is panned to either the
right or the left, seemingly at random. That's something I've only noticed
since the day before I posted this bug report.