Even completely headless, command line #linux doesn't prioritize #accessibility in any way. Today I had to reinstall an entire #debian system from scratch because a drive listed in my /etc/fstab died. That makes #systemd boot into emergency mode, where you get no SSH, no network, no sound, and no screen reader. There is no quick way to force it to try and boot even though drive 7 of 11 has died, and it could absolutely bring up SSH and the network to let me fix it if it wanted to, just like sysvinit used to do. You can't even force systemd to add SSH and the network to emergency mode because of circular dependencies. nofail will only continue the boot if the drive doesn't exist, but if the filesystem has issues...emergency mode for you. In short: if your drive dies on Linux, fuck you. Be able to see, or reinstall your entire system, because nobody in Linuxland gives a shit about #a11y or your needs.
@fastfinge wait. WHAT! You had to reinstall? You couldn't boot from USB into archiso and fsck the disk?
@freya Nope. USB images don’t support sound or screen readers. So reinstall involves creating a preseed on another machine, making a custom image, and reinstalling. If I can’t have SSH and network, or sound and a screen reader, reinstall is my only option. And the systemd emergency target denies me both of those things, as do live images.
@fastfinge incorrect. boot USB, wait 3 seconds, s, then enter, boot with screenreader. In arch images, boot USB, wait 3-5 seconsd, down, then enter. boots with speakup
@freya Only if you have a hardware synthesizer. I’ve never, in 20 years of running Linux machines, had sound work out of the box. Not once. Serial console output used to work, but not so much, these days.
@fastfinge we dunno what machine you're running on, but the integrated speech in the installer for Debian and arch works all the time every time. And again, not sure what hardware you're on, but we've got 3 machines right here with serial consoles and, when they were running Linux, they all worked. They're all running Solaris now but still
@freya Bog standard amd64 with onboard sound chipset. The live image didn’t have sound, and my installed system doesn’t either.
@fastfinge that's super weird
@freya I probably need some non free driver.
@fastfinge @freya I haven't seen something that doesn't work with standard HDA sound drivers in... decades? If you're stuck with some hardware that bad, external USB sound device (they're cheap and I've used them for multichannel signal generation stuff separate from system sound) might be a good idea to have on hand. AFAIK they're driverless (standard USB device class driver works for any of them).
@dalias @fastfinge yepyep, unless usb_audio.ko isn't in your kernel and if it ain't, the fuck you doing?
@freya @fastfinge I would expect it to be there on any accessible rescue/install media.