Created attachment 876149 [details]
screenshot 1 - kmix

Recent fresh install of Tumbleweed coming from Leap 15.4. Same laptop, same HDA Intel sound. Installed minimal X and IceWM, then KDE3.

Using kdm as the display manager and KDE3 fired right up and it is excellent shape. However, one quirk caught my eye in systray. kmix was showing a red 'X' on the icon. Clicking on kmix, no volume was displayed and then opening kmix revealed kmix could not find any mixer. The combobox for selecting the mixer was empty. (see screenshot 1 - kmix)

Wondering if this could be some base problem with the sound system, I tried alsamixer in konsole. It works fine, alsamixer can fully access the hardware. Testing further if the old 'kamix' would work and provide an old KDE2 type volume control, I tried it -- and 'kamix' works just fine as well. (see screenshot 2 - alsamixer with kamix shown in systray)

So for some reason with the current build on TW, kmix isn't detecting the basic alsa mixer, or any mixer, resulting in kmix being broken. Sound works fine, all sound themes play, etc.., kmix is just oblivious to it. The strange part is the old alsamixer and kamix have no issue accessing the mixer.

I'm fairly sound illiterate, so I can't even venture a guess why kmix is unhappy, but I'm happy to provide whatever additional information is needed to help sort this out.