Thinkpad P52 with a Nvidia GPU and Intel iGPU. after having to jump through some hoops to get it installed, this is the last thing that is bugging me and I cannot wrap my head around it.
The hoops: having to disable Secure Boot, disable the hybrid gpu settings to integrated only, Rufus not creating valid usb iso installs, keyboard layout shenanigans getting to work with Japanese inputs, my VirtualBox test run did not prepare me for this lol
Anyway, I had the same behaviour under a Windows VirtualBox install, pavucontrol output set to 100%, reboot or shutdown and the next startup would have it set to muted.
On the laptop, it is mostly a fresh install, I just ran pacman -Syu, installed Firefox, the nvidia drivers and fcitx5/mozc.
And sorry if it's a common issue, I searched and searched but the solutions on older threads and across the net kind of flew over my head. Think of it as zero experience with dotfiles -.-'