USB device permissions not applied every time I open ASM

[DefactoCasual]

I need to redo this step every time I reboot or close the app. I just want to know if there's a way to just always allow that.

I'm on Nobara 44, if that's important (installed a week ago and I don't know what I'm doing)

[jsuvanto]

Did you run asm-setup first? I'm also running on Nobara 44 and don't have that problem. I have version 1.2.8 installed with sudo dnf install python3-arctis-sound-manager.noarch which appears to be the same without need for COPR.

[DefactoCasual]

running asm-setup shows this

[DefactoCasual]

So the udev rules are there, but every boot/ app restart it asks me to reapply them

[jsuvanto]

Clarification: I get the same popup after reboot, but not after I close (right click system tray icon - Exit) and reopen the GUI.

[DefactoCasual]

To be fair, i just tested to see if closing the app (actually pressing exit to fully close it) caused the same problem or if it was just the reboot. If that popup happens after every boot and is supposed to do that then there isn't a problem, it would just be neat to have it auto run and not ask me every time.

[DefactoCasual]

I'm VERY new to Linux as a whole, I don't know how 80% of stuff works. It just seemed weird that i was asked for permissions I already granted.

[loteran]

@DefactoCasual — you did nothing wrong, and there is nothing left for you to learn here: this is a bug in ASM, and you found it. Thank you for reporting it, and sorry it made you doubt your setup a week into using Linux.

@jsuvanto handed me the answer without realising it:

Clarification: I get the same popup after reboot, but not after I close (right click system tray icon - Exit) and reopen the GUI.

That one sentence is the whole diagnosis. "Exit" from the tray also stops the background service, so reopening ASM makes it grab the headset a second time — and that second time works. Your udev rules were always fine. asm-setup showing them installed was correct.

What actually happens

Your dongle never leaves its USB port, so it gets detected while the computer is still booting — and ASM's background service starts right behind it, sometimes before the system has finished granting access to the device. That first attempt fails, and ASM reported it as "permissions are missing" when the truth was "permissions are not ready yet, one second".

Clicking the button in that dialog didn't repair the rules either. It nudged the system into re-announcing the device, which is what actually let ASM grab it.

And there was a worse side to this that neither of you could see: after that first failure, ASM gave up on the headset entirely and never tried again. So the click wasn't just dismissing a message — it was genuinely what got your headset working each boot. @DefactoCasual, when you wrote "I need to redo this step every time I reboot", you were right in a way I don't think you suspected.

The fix

ASM now retries a few seconds later instead of concluding anything. A boot-time race sorts itself out silently — no dialog, no click, headset working — while a genuinely missing rules file is still reported, just a few seconds later than before. It's in the next release; you'll get it through your normal system updates.

Until then, clicking the button remains harmless, and nothing on your systems needs changing.

One small favour, @jsuvanto

You mentioned installing with sudo dnf install python3-arctis-sound-manager.noarch, "without need for COPR". That package name puzzles me: ASM's package is called arctis-sound-manager, it has never been published under any other name, and I can't find python3-arctis-sound-manager in the Fedora repositories at all. Could you run this?

rpm -qi arctis-sound-manager python3-arctis-sound-manager 2>&1 | grep -E "Name|Version|Vendor|URL"

Most likely you enabled the COPR a while back and forgot — that would be the boring, happy answer. But if something else is shipping ASM under a different name, I'd very much like to know, because I'd end up getting bug reports for a build I don't control.

[DefactoCasual]

Thanks for the reply, It is reassuring to now know that i wasn't being shafted by weird linux quirk. Thanks for this software and for your time.

As for the package name, installing through DNF on Nobara 44 has this name listed

By running the command you asked @jsuvanto to run, this pops up:

[DefactoCasual]

This was after the update i assume you already pushed

[jsuvanto]

To my knowledge I have not enabled COPR, at least I did not run the explicit command shown in the installation instructions for Fedora/Nobara. I found the package with dnf search arctis. I also checked dnf repoinfo and I didn't see this github project as a COPR repo.

Here is your requested output and some more that may be relevant:

$ rpm -qi arctis-sound-manager python3-arctis-sound-manager 2>&1 | grep -E "Name|Version|Vendor|URL"
Name        : python3-arctis-sound-manager
Version     : 1.2.8
Vendor      : Terra
URL         : https://github.com/loteran/Arctis-Sound-Manager

Full output:

$ rpm -qi arctis-sound-manager python3-arctis-sound-manager
package arctis-sound-manager is not installed
Name        : python3-arctis-sound-manager
Version     : 1.2.8
Release     : 1.fc44
Architecture: noarch
Install Date: pe 24. heinäkuuta 2026 07.40.47
Group       : Unspecified
Size        : 21336379
License     : GPL-3.0-or-later
Signature   :
              EdDSA/SHA256, ke 22. heinäkuuta 2026 13.12.56, Key ID 00cdab43de226d6f
              EdDSA/SHA256, ke 22. heinäkuuta 2026 13.12.56, Key ID 00cdab43de226d6f
Source RPM  : python-arctis-sound-manager-1.2.8-1.fc44.src.rpm
Build Date  : ke 22. heinäkuuta 2026 13.12.36
Build Host  : 180d19e114dd
Packager    : Owen Zimmerman <owen@fyralabs.com>
Vendor      : Terra
URL         : https://github.com/loteran/Arctis-Sound-Manager
Summary     : GUI for SteelSeries Arctis headsets
Description :
Linux GUI for SteelSeries Arctis headsets — Nova Pro Wireless & Wired, Nova Pro Omni, Nova Elite, Nova 7/7P/5/3, Arctis 7/7+/9/Pro Wireless. Device settings, Sonar EQ, 4-channel Game/Chat/Media mixer, PipeWire routing.

And then dnf info:

$ sudo dnf info python3-arctis-sound-manager
Updating and loading repositories:
 Terra 44                                                                                                                                                   100% |   1.9 KiB/s |   1.4 KiB |  00m01s
 Copr repo for noise-suppression-for-voice owned by lkiesow                                                                                                 100% |   2.8 KiB/s |   1.5 KiB |  00m01s
Repositories loaded.
Installed packages
Name            : python3-arctis-sound-manager
Epoch           : 0
Version         : 1.2.8
Release         : 1.fc44
Architecture    : noarch
Installed size  : 20.3 MiB
Source          : python-arctis-sound-manager-1.2.8-1.fc44.src.rpm
From repository : terra
Summary         : GUI for SteelSeries Arctis headsets
URL             : https://github.com/loteran/Arctis-Sound-Manager
License         : GPL-3.0-or-later
Description     : Linux GUI for SteelSeries Arctis headsets — Nova Pro Wireless & Wired, Nova Pro Omni, Nova Elite, Nova 7/7P/5/3, Arctis 7/7+/9/Pro Wireless. Device settings, Sonar EQ, 4-channel 
                : Game/Chat/Media mixer, PipeWire routing.
Vendor          : Terra

Available packages
Name           : python3-arctis-sound-manager
Epoch          : 0
Version        : 1.2.10
Release        : 1.fc44
Architecture   : noarch
Download size  : 14.1 MiB
Installed size : 20.4 MiB
Source         : python-arctis-sound-manager-1.2.10-1.fc44.src.rpm
Repository     : terra
Summary        : GUI for SteelSeries Arctis headsets
URL            : https://github.com/loteran/Arctis-Sound-Manager
License        : GPL-3.0-or-later
Description    : Linux GUI for SteelSeries Arctis headsets — Nova Pro Wireless & Wired, Nova Pro Omni, Nova Elite, Nova 7/7P/5/3, Arctis 7/7+/9/Pro Wireless. Device settings, Sonar EQ, 4-channel G
               : ame/Chat/Media mixer, PipeWire routing.
Vendor         : Terra

So it appears that the Terra (I'm not familiar with it so can't say much about it) has adopted your project and Nobara has included it in its repos.

[jsuvanto]

Unfortunately I still get the same behaviour after updating to 1.2.10.

[loteran]

Is not my package ... it's why it don't work

[loteran]

Thank you both — your outputs answered a question I'd been circling for two days, and it explains more than the package name.

The package you have isn't the one this project publishes

@jsuvanto's rpm -qi says it plainly:

Name    : python3-arctis-sound-manager
Vendor  : Terra
Packager: (empty)
Source  : python-arctis-sound-manager-1.2.8-1.fc44.src.rpm

That build comes from Terra, a third-party Fedora repository enabled by default on Nobara and Ultramarine. It is built from this project's source — same code, same licence, and their spec is clearly derived from ours — but it is packaged and shipped by someone else. That's why dnf search arctis finds it without you ever enabling anything, and why the name differs from what our documentation says.

Nothing malicious about it, and I'm not upset that it exists. But it is not the package I publish, and I can't fix it from here.

Two consequences, and they matter for what you're seeing

1. The fix for this very problem is in 1.2.11. @jsuvanto, you tested 1.2.10 — that release does not contain it. The retry that stops the permission dialog from appearing on every boot shipped the version after. So "same behaviour" is expected on 1.2.10, and worth retesting.

2. The Terra build declares no dependencies at all. Their spec has zero Requires: lines. Ours has sixteen, and two of them exist because their absence causes real, reported crashes:

• pulseaudio-utils — provides pactl. Without it, a clean install crashes on launch (issue Crash on first start after clean install from apt #117)
• ladspa-swh-plugins — without it, spatial audio loads nothing and stays silent (issue Nova Pro Wireless on SteamOS #88)

plus pipewire, wireplumber, libusb1, curl and the Python bindings. On a system where those happen to be installed already, everything works. On one where they aren't, you get failures that look like bugs in ASM and are not.

If you'd like the package from this project

sudo dnf remove python3-arctis-sound-manager
sudo dnf copr enable loteran/arctis-sound-manager
sudo dnf install arctis-sound-manager
asm-setup

It carries the dependency list above, and it updates within minutes of a release rather than whenever the third-party rebuild catches up.

If you'd rather stay on Terra, that's entirely fine — but please mention it when reporting a problem, because I may be reading code that isn't the code you're running. As of the next release, the bug report and asm-cli diagnose will state it automatically:

owned-by[rpm]=python3-arctis-sound-manager 1.2.13-1.fc44 vendor=Terra

@DefactoCasual — and thank you for the kind words earlier. For what it's worth, "it seemed weird that I was asked for permissions I already granted" was exactly the right instinct, and it found a real bug that affected everyone, not just you.

[DefactoCasual]

Is it just launching the GUI but nothing else?

[DefactoCasual]

These are in .local/bin, not sure what else besides the highlighted ones belong to ASM

[DefactoCasual]

[DefactoCasual]

Problem solved, there were some files in /home/.local/lib/python3.14/site-packages that belonged to an older/different version.

I deleted those files and left the ones located at /usr/lib/python3.14/site-packages/arctis_sound_manager untouched. 1.2.18 is now detected and works.

[DefactoCasual]

I now think that rpm -ql is my favourite command

[loteran]

Small follow-up: rather than leave this as "their build, not mine", I've sent the fix to Terra directly.

terrapkg/packages#14469 — fix(Arctis-Sound-Manager): declare runtime dependencies

It adds the sixteen Requires: their spec was missing, including the two that cause the failures I mentioned above — pulseaudio-utils (without it, a clean install crashes at launch) and ladspa-swh-plugins (without it, Spatial Audio stays silent) — plus the Python bindings, which aren't detected automatically because they're imported at runtime rather than declared as build metadata. Nothing else in their spec is touched: no version bump, no packager change.

I also offered to keep the packaging in sync going forward, so this doesn't drift again.

Once that lands and Terra rebuilds, the package you already have will pick up the dependencies through a normal dnf upgrade — no reinstall, no repo switching. Until then, either path works:

• Stay on Terra and install the two packages by hand if you hit either symptom:

  sudo dnf install pulseaudio-utils ladspa-swh-plugins

• Or switch to the COPR build from the earlier comment, which carries them today.

@jsuvanto — separately from all of this, the boot-time permission dialog is fixed in 1.2.11, and you tested 1.2.10, so that one is still worth a retest whenever Terra's rebuild reaches you.

[jsuvanto]

Release notes for 1.2.10 state it was already fixed in that release. I now understand that the Terra-provided version I was using may have not had that fix included for some reason.

I will test with a newer version (both Terra and COPR) by end of this week and report here.

[jsuvanto]

As promised, I tested a newer version (1.2.19). First, I updated the existing installation (installed through Terra), rebooted and I still got the same error message.

I then uninstalled the Terra-provided package, rebooted and installed ASM using COPR. It looked like the asm-setup command was run as part of the postinstall step, so I didn't run that command manually. I rebooted and am still getting the same error message.