My Mint laptop audio stopped working for a couple months and then miraculously fixed itself this week. I made various attempts to fix it with no luck. It’s either a hardware issue or some obscure software issue.
In the past, I had plugged in a HDMI cable to mirror the screen and couldn’t get the audio working again until I plugged it back into HDMI and switched it back to the internal speakers before unplugging HDMI. Before the audio broke this time, I had connected a USB microphone, so it’s possible that’s what did it.




Interesting, I’ve only ever had this issue in Mint as well.