[graceful6800]

You know what? I think this is dead on. Like a lot of us, I grew up in the 90s tinkering with Windows regestries and internals. That knowledge only ever really helped me with Windows systems, and it really only carried me up to Windows 7/10. After that, it felt like debugging an opaque blob, just pulling levers until something different happened and trying a blind binary search across random behaviors.

But since Linux is open, you can observe it as a holistic system. You don't need to-- and likely shouldn't try to understand it as a whole, but you can follow a thread all the way down if you want to. If the audio system really pisses you off, you do have the power to follow it and fully understand it.

Thinking about systems and how many different pieces fit together to make a cohesive whole is honestly the vast majority of my life and work as an engineer. It's a fundamental skill that doesn't seem very common outside the realm of nerds who like picking apart complex problems. But it's certainly my most heavily used skill, and in large part it's because I got into Linux as a teenager in an era where Linux was absolutely not meant for teenagers to be daily driving on a new laptop with no drivers.