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.
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=enabledThe 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.