When I changed the dashes to underscores I got the following

I honestly don't think snd-hda-intel is even in the kernel. Else why would modprobing and grepping it keep coming up blank?

The alternative is that someone changed the name without telling anyone.

The dashes and underscores are interchangeable as used in module names... It's the find program that needs provoking.

snd_hda_intel is loaded so, maybe the hdmi is the module for your laptop... ?

snd_hda_codec_hdmi... try that name in stead in /etc/modules... and try again.

I wish I knew a better way of trouble shooting audio on Linux.

Anyway, the line reads like this, the dominant module and then the dependants are listed.

like this...
snd_hda_codec 204800 2 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel

I haven't got much else.

I'll tell you this, Arch and Gentoo have really good HOW-TO-... pages.

HDMI, of course is a video connector that also has provision for audio. Laptop screens use this... a lot.

Have a read of this and see if it helps...

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA)
https://alsa-project.org/wiki/Main_Page

see how you go.

The crazy thing is that the analog stereo audio did use to work on Linux. I know this because until an update I can't remember I was using a pair of Philips headphones plugged straight into my laptop's headphones/line out jack, which was running Ubuntu something or other. I've had this particular computer (the aforementioned laptop) for at least four years now and have been using it with exclusively Ubuntu Linux for most of that time. When I got it it did have Windows 10 installed but surely Linux couldn't access the Windows hardware drivers. Could it?

My laptop screen has no built in speakers. So hdmi is useless to me.

I'm trying to install the Intel8x0 module from https://alsa-project.org/wiki/Matrix:Module-intel8x0 but I keep running into the following issue

Even if I include the name of the module I still get the same result

And now I see that the page was last updated 12 years ago

A quick search found snd-hda-intel.ko and snd-intel8x0.ko in /usr/lib/modules/6.2.0-20-generic/kernel/sound/pci/ and /usr/lib/modules/6/2/0-20-generic/kernel/sound/pci/hda. So they're definitely there but for some reason neither pulseaudio nor pipewire are communicating with them.

Also in 6.2.0.23

Update.

Guessing that this has you all stumped I decided to try a few things. First I purged pulseaudio from the system, rebooted and ran qjackctl with the hw:PCH option. No luck. Then I purged pipewire and did the same again. Still no luck. Next I purged Alsa, rebooted and, well obviously qjackctl wasn't going to start now. So I reinstalled pipewire and alsa along with the pipewire alsa plugin and some OSS stuff and now qjackctl connects to hw:PCH but I'm still not getting an analog option in the mixer plugin for Xfce4 panel and there's still no signal being passed to the onboard speakers or the phones/line out jack.

But at least qjackctl knows I have a soundcard. So that's a start.

aplay -L results

I am using wireplumber to govern what was left of pulseaudio, but there is still one or two pulse packages installed...

pipewire-pulse

it's certainly a strange situation. is there a bios//firmware update for any of it, the hardware?

I'm not aware of any. Maybe one of the developers knows?

I also still have some pulse libraries installed. But only because I need them for certain apps

Hmm

That isn't what I want.