A workaround script that allows you to change the system volume by a desired step size while still triggering Cinnamon's volume notification OSD (On Screen Display).

Originally based on garrett92895's script for GNOME.

The script is built using Python3 and has a the following requirements

• python3
• python3-dbus (or equivalent)
• pactl

The package with the correct version is listed as python-dbus in the Arch repositories and python3-dbus in the Debian and Fedora repositories. You can get pactl from the pulseaudio-utils package in Fedora (still works fine with PipeWire).

Note that the usage differs to the original script.

python volume-change.py [change]

Where [change] is the percentage to change volume by, e.g. -2 or 2 to decrease/increase by 2%.

Because this script will run every time you press the volume up or down keys, you may want to run a compiled version. You can compile the script with basic optimizations with

python -O -m py_compile volume-change.py

You can then grab the .pyc output from the __pycache__ folder and substitute volume-change.py for that.

The motivation for this script is the same as the original: the volume step amount is too large and is hardcoded into Cinnamon. The GNOME devs have since been sensible and made this configurable through a config setting, but the same cannot be said for the Cinnamon devs who have actively refused to make the same change.

Previously I used perspektiv as a replacement for the volume OSD, however it now crashes with newer GTK versions so I decided to look into using the built-in OSD instead.

This script also uses pactl instead of amixer like the original script. This is because setting the volume with amixer somehow results in Cinnamon reporting a different value.