Comment 10 for bug 1684108

José, thanks for pointing out a workaround!

I haven't had time to confirm yet but I may have found the reason the script /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 wasn't running correctly on my system. When I tried executing it manually I got the error message "Failed to open sound file." Looking at the script it contains the line

/usr/bin/pactl upload-sample /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/bell.ogg bell.ogg > /dev/null

However, the file /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/bell.ogg wasn't present on my system. Since the script is run with sh -e it will stop on the first failure and therefore not load module-device-manager. I found out that the sound file is part of the package ubuntu-sounds - once installed, the script runs correctly.

José, could you please check if you have the package ubuntu-sounds installed? The description says "Ubuntu's GNOME audio theme" so no wonder it's not installed by default on Kubuntu. This therefore seems to be a packaging bug in pulseaudio - the package should depend on ubuntu-sounds.