[conspire] no audio to headphone

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Steve Litt (slitt at troubleshooters.com):

> Sorry. I thought Paul Zander is an expert because he's on this list.

I don't want to diss Paul, who is a tech veteran and IEEE member (I
think?), but IMO both he and anyone else deserves a caution if a
suggestion amounts to radical distro rewriting.

> You bring up an excellent point. What I suggested is fighting your
> distro, and why do that? Concidentally, I just updated a
> Troubleshooters.Com article on this very subject:
> 
> http://troubleshooters.com/linux/avoid_complexity.htm

As usual, I very much like your framing and analysis.  To paraphrase, if
you find yourself being tempted to fundamentally re-engineer your
distro, probably your problem is _better_ addressed by moving sideways to
a distro better matching your preferences.

That glosses, of course over the _difficult_ part, of knowing which
sorts of tinkering are mild and easily reverted, versus which others
might break things badly enough that you'll want to wipe & reinstall.
I don't have any easy answer, to that.

I don't intend to call novices "fools", but the proverb "Fools rush in
where angels fear to tread" comes to mind, anyway.

Notoriously over several decades, I repeatedly got yelps of "Help me!"
from novices who followed incredibly reckless "do this unorthodox thing
using out-of-tree proprietary drivers to better support 3D accelerated
video" or something like that -- and I find everything so badly broken,
with zero records and nothing backed up, that after 2 hours I'm obliged
to say "Sorry, you broke it.  Next time, maybe don't?"

Back then, nine times out of ten, the terrible advice came from a
LinuxForums.org.  More recently, almost always ubuntuforums.org
(though in fairness, the general quality of information there has gotten
much better, and should be commended).  I note the unifying thread of 
"was on a Web discussion board aimed particularly at novices".

Backing up:  In _general_, you can reasonably infer from a user having
chosen distro X that he/she prefers and expects the characteristic 
distro X-type approach and tools -- and ought to get a heads-up if 
you're suggesting a wrenching change that does otherwise.

For example, if it's Debian, than you would ordinarily infer that the
user wants to stay within the apt-managed & distro-provided package
regime, and that any "I don't need no steenking package management"
crazy-ass moves with git checkouts and building source code from
Basingstoke will at least be confined to /usr/local/ .

A Linux from Scratch user, well, not so much.