My headphones are always connected to the front port, when I want to use them, I just open kmix an mute speakers and unmute headphones.
In KaOS we have pulseaudio by default so kmix looks like this:
Trying to remove pulseaudo involves remove almost half of the system too, so I just edited /usr/share/autostart/kmix_autostart.desktop
#Exec=kmix
Exec=KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 kmix
Now pulseaudio is disabled and I have my options back
But when I mute the system and try to unmute it, Front and Headphone channels remain muted, Also when connect or disconnect the headphones the hole system mute, even with Auto-mute Mode disabled.
Disabling pulseaudio from systemd doesn't help.
$ sudo systemctl disable pulseaudio