Looking at the bug which is now marked as a duplicate of this, Bug #316199, I discovered (which I didn't know before), that you _can_ fix the volume with the gnome panel applet, if you right-click, choose preferences, and adjust the "Master" and "PCM" channels.
Note, that with the "laptop" routing, the required mixer channels are "Master" and "PCM", not "Front" and "PCM".
I presume there is no API to query from Alsa which mixer channels are actually in the "pipeline" between the stream sent by Pulsaudio, and the sound reaching some external hardware?
Looking at the bug which is now marked as a duplicate of this, Bug #316199, I discovered (which I didn't know before), that you _can_ fix the volume with the gnome panel applet, if you right-click, choose preferences, and adjust the "Master" and "PCM" channels.
Note, that with the "laptop" routing, the required mixer channels are "Master" and "PCM", not "Front" and "PCM".
I presume there is no API to query from Alsa which mixer channels are actually in the "pipeline" between the stream sent by Pulsaudio, and the sound reaching some external hardware?