And this is what solved my sound problem this time (Ubuntu)

Sat Nov 06 2021 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Pulseaudio reported a dummy device, alsamixer said there were devices, but they had no controls. Ubuntu 21.10 on a laptop with a graphics card.

Anyway, what solved it was to add this to /etc/default/grub, to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line:

snd_hda_intel.dmic_detect=0

And then:

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg