Fix for no audio in minimal templates in QubesOS

The reason why audio won’t work out of the box in minimal templates (debian-12-minimal, fedora-41-minimal) is that the package responsible for sending audio from VMs to your host (dom0 or sys-audio), pipewire-qubes, isn’t included in them by default.

For debian-X-minimal

This took me a long time to realize, but for audio to work on minimal templates, you need to:

  1. Install pipewire-qubes from apt inside the TemplateVM:
sudo apt install pipewire-qubes
  1. Shut down the TemplateVM and the AppVM.
  2. (This is important!) Restart your computer, or if you are using sys-audio, go to Qube Manager and restart the sys-audio VM.

Without restarting the VMs or sys-audio, it won’t work. Save your sanity and just restart it.

This will also help if your audio stops working after installing Nix on your VM, which it likely will.

For fedora-X-minimal

For fedora-minimal templates, the same steps apply, but use:

sudo dnf install pipewire-qubes