Mate Desktop questions

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Isn't Linux Mint still based on Ubuntu? How did they fix the problem of 
having to log out and back in to get a talking installer that Ubuntu has 
yet to fix? Ubuntu 21.10 needs to take a page from the Linux Mint 
playbook to make their installer talk without having to go through the 
work-around logout login procedure to get it talking. I myself would 
look at Mint, but I'm not fond of the Debian base. That doesn't preclude 
my installation of this distro for others, as I have been known to 
install Ubuntu for its ease of use, although I'm more partial to Fedora 
Linux these days, especially since it includes flatpak out of the box, 
and snapd can be installed quite easily. I actually have a couple of 
snaps working here without any issues.


First, to get to the panel with the system tray, you usually hold down 
the alt and control keys and press the tab key repeatedly until you hear 
"top panel." But if I remember correctly, Mint has no top panel, only 
the bottom one, so your system tray is there. So if you never hear "top 
panel," just go to the bottom panel and you're good.


The sound issue is caused by a conflict between more than one user 
trying to access sound at the same time. The conflict appears to be a 
race condition where the first user's sound session doesn't get killed 
fast enough, so the second user is blocked from using the sound device. 
This usually is not a problem using Pulseaudio, but for some reason 
Pipewire still has this problem. I switched up mine on Arch and I see 
the same thing, even running a talking login screen and then logging in 
as my normal user on a single-user system. Again, I only saw this when I 
switched that system to pipewire and installed the pipewire-pulse or 
pipewire-pulseaudio package, so it sounds like this may be what Mint is 
doing. It should be possible to resolve the issue using regular 
pulseaudio. If pulseaudio is already installed and this problem is still 
occurring, I'm not sure where to look next, unless you can set up a 
session wrapper script that will kill the user's running pulseaudio when 
that user logs out, which should happen automatically, but may not be 
happening early enough. I hope this helps.

~Kyle