Sound cuts out despite working sometimes, OS doesnt recognize the existence of PulseAudio but still refuses to let me download it

So I have been trying to fix this for about 24 hours and I am on the verge of pulling my hair out. Yesterday my laptop speakers started crackling out of nowhere which was shortly but not instantly followed by the audio on my laptop stopping completely, now originally my audio output showed up as being speakers (despite the speakers clearly not working) and didnt recognize it when I plugged in my headphones. I restarted my laptop and it worked for about 20 minutes before stopping again, this time it had my headphones set as the output device and once again there was no sound. No matter what I did the laptop audio would continue working for a little while and stop working for a much longer while, at one point I plugged in a USB microphone which did work as an input device which made me believe that the issue was with the headphone jack. Then around 2 hours ago the audio was working fine with the speakers and all of a sudden my laptop told me I had plugged in my headphones, something which I had not done, and preceeded to say it switch to headset output and the audio stopped working again. Now as I'm writing this I've done a clean install of Ubuntu and restarted my laptop several times and all this seems to have achieved is that now my laptop doesnt even recognize the existence of any output or input devices or seemingly even the concept of sound on my laptop.

Throughout all of this as well I have not been able to do anything in relation to PulseAudio as for some bloody reason whenever I write a pulseaudio command it claims that it doesnt recognize it and tells me to use

sudo apt install pulseaudio

but then when I try and do that I get this result:

Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 pop-desktop : Conflicts: pulseaudio
               Conflicts: pulseaudio:i386
               Recommends: io.elementary.sideload but it is not installable
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

Please help me out here as I am not nearly competent enough at Linux to figure this out and I am in no way in a financial situation to buy a new laptop if something is properly broken, I'm really hoping there's a fix for this and it's not a hardware piece just dying.

Originally Posted by Gregnant Now as I'm writing this I've done a clean install of Ubuntu...

Except...

The following packages have unmet dependencies: pop-desktop : Conflicts: pulseaudio Conflicts: pulseaudio:i386 Recommends: io.elementary.sideload but it is not installable

"pop-desktop" is not a Ubuntu package, (it's the desktop of Pop!_OS from System76), though "io.elementary.sideload" potentially indicates Elementary OS.

i.e. this is either not really Ubuntu and/or not a clean install. If you have a System76 machine you should contact support to see what they say.

In any case, when reporting issues like this you need to give precise details about software and hardware versions. Inxi is a tool that makes this easier - it's installed by default in most distros now, so running "inxi -SAxxz" should give some information.

However, what you describe does sound like a hardware issue. That doesn't automatically mean you need a new computer - depending on the device and what's gone wrong, maybe there's a replaceable part (less easy with notebooks, but not necessarily impossible), and even if not you can simply get a USB-powered soundcard and disable the on-board one.

@Gregnant Don't install but try a different distro running it on a live USB to determine if it's hardware or a distro issue. MX Linux has that capability. https://mxlinux.org/mx-linux-blog/