At a guess, the counter goes up by fractions of a day internally, but it’s reset by subtracting the integer part, rounded.
The original version wouldn’t have had the rounding but they “fixed” that after the first time they did a reset and it went to 1 not 0.
As to why they wouldn’t just set it to zero, well here we have the joke under a microscope and it’s struggling to stay alive. Put the scalpel down.






Pipewire is newer and emulates PulseAudio so that it can be used as a drop-in replacement. There’s literally a command called
pipewire-pulserelated to this.It makes me wonder if they really have both installed or are mistaking Pipewire’s emulation for an active PulseAudio installation, and so it’s just Pipewire that’s acting up.
I’d say reboot, but being in space might be one of those times where that’s a non-starter. In which case, they’re going to have to get their hands dirty unpicking system hooks and trying to reattach them all again as and when Pipewire’s working again, assuming it doesn’t do that automatically.
I never had a problem with either Pipewire or real PulseAudio back when that was current. I had motherboard sound physically pop, requiring the purchase of a separate sound card, but never a driver issue, so I can’t even imagine what might be going on.