Wow, that’s a sobering read. And comprehensive, and insightful. I hope this gets some attention and results in much needed improvements in that area.

Oh, yeah. This doesn’t surprise me. There’s barely any nod to accessibility, and all of that’s in desktop functionality. A braille terminal sounds like an utter nightmare, especially with more recent, “modern” tooling that insists on colorizing output, or self-managing paging. Libraries like Bubbletea make for some pretty output, but it’s downright hostile for screen readers.

This is an old problem, too. I can’t count the number of times I’ve furiously wasted time cleaning up output from a program that insisted on using terminal color codes. And I’m fully sighted.

But here’s where Debian gets tripped up by the ecosystem: the moment you hit a login prompt, you enter a session with user-locked audio. This isn’t Debian’s fault. It’s the fault of PulseAudio, PipeWire, and the entire philosophy of session-bound audio daemons that don’t care what the kernel is doing.

It’s worth noting that PipeWire is being developed with support for a system-wide, multi-user instance, which should solve the problem that I think the author is describing above. When I last checked a couple years ago, it was enabled with this build option: -Dsystemd-system-service=enabled

The name of that flag seems to imply that systemd is required, which would be disappointing for folks who use other init systems. I haven’t tried it, so I don’t know if it’s a true requirement or just a name that was convenient at the time it was created.

But here’s where Debian gets tripped up by the ecosystem: the moment you hit a login prompt, you enter a session with user-locked audio. This isn’t Debian’s fault. It’s the fault of PulseAudio, PipeWire, and the entire philosophy of session-bound audio daemons that don’t care what the kernel is doing.

It always seemed sus to me that Debian of all distros would stop adding ALSA by default, tbh. And for the crap that was PA at the time, too!

To make things worse, Systemd assumes everyone is willing, able and compliant, but even using Linux in the first assumes at least the latest one is not always true.

Didn’t lennart also do pulse-audio as well as his systemd cancer? I’d not be surprised to hear that one crutches on the other and excludes choice.