systemd keeps respawning pulseaudio, and doesn't allow me to stop it

So I was trying to stop pulseaudio with pulseaudio -k, but it kept restarting "on its own", even though I have the configuration autospawn = no in place.

I'm pretty sure it's systemd that keeps restarting it, as instructed by /usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service:

[Unit]
Description=Sound Service
[Service]
# Note that notify will only work if --daemonize=no
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no
Restart=on-failure
[Install]
Also=pulseaudio.socket
WantedBy=default.target

But the thing is, when I try to stop this service with systemctl stop pulseaudio.service, systemctl returns me the following:

Failed to stop pulseaudio.service: Unit pulseaudio.service not loaded.

How do I stop/disable this service?

3 Answers

To stop user services it's necessary to use the parameter --user:

systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service

systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.socket helped me to make it not restart after killing it. changing autospawn and daemon-binary configs didn't help and disabling the service also didn't help.

source:

Also see

In the files:
/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.socket
/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service
just below the line:
ConditionUser=!root
add:
ConditionUser=!gdm

That's it!