After upgrading to Plasma 5.25.0 I was very confused when plasma-pa widget did not show any device as being the default sink (output for clients). Upon restarting [PipeWire] daemons the plasma-pa OSD did show that the virtual sink I expected was in fact added, so I went to check if it's now the default and then I realized that it's still not showing any sink being default and that there was no mention of the virtual device which had clearly been added. Naturally I then checked the full KCM Audio panel which did in fact list it present and default. Therefore I checked widget's configuration options and found in it, I believe, new entry `Display: <checkbox> Show virtual devices` which for some reason was unchecked. This is wrong on two levels: 1) I find it hard to understand why would anyone want such functionality in the first place because there's usually no virtual devices at all and when they are, the only devices someone might want to find would be select physical devices but never the virtual ones and 2) as a self evident fact, you would *never* set that as the default, because any virtual devices present are there because something intentionally created them (with the only possible exception being the Dummy device which is there when no other audio node is present to save badly written PA clients from hanging themselves). After having an informal talk with Nate Graham I am led to believe that this was implemented by Valve developers for Steam Deck which for some inexplicable reason has virtual devices always present which they do not want listed by default. And I was made to understand that plasma-pa upstream would be unwilling to change the default to show virtual devices by default. Therefore it would be great if Gentoo could change the default on our end, so that there's one less distro which confuses it users for no good reason, because there's no good reason why we'd want to not show virtual devices by default when they are expected to exist only after user has intentionally created them. Reproducible: Always
Sorry for the logical typo, in paragraph three I meant "... the only devices someone might want to *not* find would be select physical devices ..."
Please raise your bug upstream instead. Gentoo is not in the business of changing defaults. If this is such an illogical change, then more people will be of the same opinion to drive a better upstream solution.
As I said in paragraph four of the bug description, my understanding having talked to someone in at least some degree of knowledge on this is that plasma-pa upstream is very unlikely to reverse this choice. As for Gentoo not fixing bad upstream decisions, that's not my approach to packages I work on but fair enough regarding the KDE project. I have closed this as WONTFIX.
Upstream decisions can always be revised, and it has happened plenty of times in the past.
