No sound device detected

I realized I forgot to try to troubleshoot pulseaudio, as was possibly suggested by the reaction to sudo alsa force-reload. According to the pulseaudio page, I run

rm -r ~/.config/pulse; pulseaudio -k

and I rebooted. Now it works! :)

I had the same issue and it turned out because I was logged into gdm using root and pulseaudio does not start correctly in this case but if you run the following command it works correctly:

pulseaudio -D