Ayatana Sound indicator doesn't preserve speaker mute status

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After a long hiatus of using Ubuntu MATE in favor of Debian Unstable ('trixie'), I just installed Ubuntu MATE 24.10 because my hard disk failed. :no_good_man: There are things I could complain about Ubuntu MATE, but for the time being I'm more concerned about the aftermath of the data loss. But there is one particularly annoying aspect of this release (at least this release -- maybe prior releases too, but I haven't checked).

I tend to run my computer with the sound volume muted the vast majority of the time. But every time I mute the audio volume in Ubuntu MATE, when I next reboot or log back in, the volume is unmuted again, and I get disorienting sound effects when, say, some advertisement on a Web page starts blaring a video. No matter how many times I mute the audio, it gets unmuted again as soon as I next reboot.

I've got a hunch that this maybe has something to do with the switch from PulseAudio to PipeWire. I saw this line of output in my ~/.xsession-errors file:

(process:2507): ayatana-indicator-sound-WARNING **: 16:11:53.648: volume-control-pulse.vala:756: unable to get pulse unix socket: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.PulseAudio1 was not provided by any .service files

Does anybody else experience this problem? Is it intended behavior? (I doubt it.) Should I try to fix it in the ayatana-indicator-sound source code and upload my fix?

TIA.

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I do not mute my audio and do not have similar hassle due to the following settings:

  • No sound theme in UM's audio settings
  • Block audio and video in Firefox Autoplay configuration section.
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