I observe the same issue on an Lenovo L480 laptop. After upgrading from Debian11 to Debian12, audio/sound did not work anymore.
Running these commands systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service systemctl --user start pulseaudio.socket systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service enables the the audio system. But the settings do not survive a reboot. I'm using the Mate desktop. Let me know if you need anymore information. Cheers, Alois
