[conspire] Modularity: was no audio to headphone

[Steve Litt]

Rick Moen said on Sat, 8 Jul 2023 01:44:51 -0700

>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.

Yes!

In general, anything that's modular enough to be self-contained is
something that can be plug replaced is mild and easily reverted for the
person with some GNU/Linux experience. I remember when Ubuntu switched
from Gnome2 to either Gnome3 or Unity (long time, forgot details), and
everybody bailed from Ubuntu. How silly: You just install another WM/DE
(Window Manager or Desktop Environment). I switched to Xfce and was
done with it.

Another example: It's trivial to install the runit (or s6) supervisor
to be run from syvinit's /etc/inittab, and slowly, at your leasure,
move your daemons from sysvinit to runit. Heck, I was doing that back
in the 00's except I was using daemontools instead of runit.

[snip]

>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?"

LOL, I totally boked my runit runlevel stuff, and acted just like you
said in the preceding paragraph. It took me about a day to get things
running right again, and "right" still included some kludges.

A lot of my problem, however, was a documentation problem. Void hasn't
documented their long chains of symlinks to implement runit runlevels.
I think a lot of "dumb user" problems are really documentation
problems. Thank goodness for the documentation of Arch and Gentoo.

[snip]

>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.

Yes!

I think my point is that Linux users should, for their own benefit,
learn over time so they can migrate to distros with less training
wheels, safety belts and forced ways of doing things, so they can
change/replace/add things in a modular way. Because in the long run,
all those "do it the distro's way" geegaws make it more difficult to
boss your computer instead of having your computer boss you.

http://troubleshooters.com/linux/diy/images/hidty.png

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm