I have used Linux as my main desktop and laptop OS for 17 years, and see these problems frequently. It used to be a system I could keep completely in my head, and understand what was happening and why. But from maybe 2005 onwards there has been a persistent and accelerating trend of replacing the old working and transparent (though possibly a bit baroque) infrastructure with fancy new components that are completely inscrutable. And the lack of transparency gets worse and worse the thicker these layers of garbage get. It's mostly fine as long as things work. But things never seem to work if you have a configuration that differs even a bit from the default.
Want to log in from a terminal and start X? Well, too bad there's some new infrastructure this month that makes sure you'll only get access to the sound device when you log in from a properly configured gdm. Want to modify the keyboard layout? Whoops, the xmodmap format that had been stable for a couple of decades now changed for the third time in a year. Want to add a tmpfs on /tmp to fstab? Well, too bad. Some implicit and undebuggable circular dependencies in systemd will make the system unbootable.
And the sad parts are that the problems this new infrastructure is supposed to solve never actually existed. "Great, now audio doesn't work at all. But if it worked, it would have full support for network transparency". It's easy to understand why the problem exists - creating something new tends to be more rewarding than working on the old stuff. It's much harder to see how to fix this madness.
Move to a simpler distribution that won't bother you. I've been on Arch for the last few years because once I set it up, new updates won't add new "functionality". It isn't perfect, but I can keep the entire system in my head. Nothing opaque, nothing inscrutable -- the design philosophy is KISS. It won't hold your hand, but it also won't get in your way.
PulseAudio doesn't depend on GDM, you just need to create a config for it; What I do (on fedora) is move the default.pa from /var/lib/gdm/.pulse/default.pa to ~/.pulse...
You can't expect everything to work when you tear out components then fail to configure things properly...
I wasn't tearing out components. I was doing everything exactly the way I'd been doing forever, and it no longer worked. Which is bad in itself, but maybe it's understandable that niche usecases break every now and then. It's just that it's happened so often and for so many parts of the system that it's hard for at least me to think it's isolated incidents rather than a cultural issue.
The truly toxic part is that every single transition adds complexity and reduces transparency, making it harder and harder to understand the system. It's just not the breakage alone, or the complexity alone, or even the lack of transparency. It's the combination of all of those.
In the start of this thread jrockway proudly says that all you need is deep understanding all the components and the system as a whole. Back in the day this was not actually an unreasonable thing. But it's been getting less and less reasonable for a long time.
(Incidentally the audio example in my original message wasn't even directly related to pulseaudio. It was a few years back, but IIRC it was some daemon tweaking the device permissions, and something else adding users to a special group in the GDM login path but not the console one.)
Well, GDM tends to handle a lot of initialization that it shouldn't be the one doing, using a distribution that doesn't assume you're using GNOME may help with this.
About the transitions supposedly adding complexity; I don't know about you, but systemd, for example, has greatly simplified configuration and management of services, mountpoints, timers, and all sorts of things.
I use awesome in Fedora 17 on some early-2010 entry-level consumer intel hardware, everything is zippy, easy to configure, and doesn't break on me all the time; I feel bad for you man.
Want to log in from a terminal and start X? Well, too bad there's some new infrastructure this month that makes sure you'll only get access to the sound device when you log in from a properly configured gdm. Want to modify the keyboard layout? Whoops, the xmodmap format that had been stable for a couple of decades now changed for the third time in a year. Want to add a tmpfs on /tmp to fstab? Well, too bad. Some implicit and undebuggable circular dependencies in systemd will make the system unbootable.
And the sad parts are that the problems this new infrastructure is supposed to solve never actually existed. "Great, now audio doesn't work at all. But if it worked, it would have full support for network transparency". It's easy to understand why the problem exists - creating something new tends to be more rewarding than working on the old stuff. It's much harder to see how to fix this madness.