@TomF @0xabad1dea imo the audio architecture under the hood isn't terribly difficult to follow (unless you're doing stuff with KS, which does get pretty involved), but the entire user-facing frontend portion is an unfinished spaghetti mess that defies discoverability.

well, I guess that statement is applicable to the entire settings UX right now, but the audio one is particularly egregious. networking is a close second.

@synx508 @0xabad1dea oof. I've probably lucked out on that by refusing to set up a cloud account for login, but obviously that's not always feasible

@0xabad1dea in the end I modified the DACL on the registry key so it couldn't touch it.

@0xabad1dea I found out about the uninstall-breaks-audio thing when one of the insipid vendor bloatware apps had the audacity to switch "Disable all enhancements" off in the registry every 10 seconds, so they could force their post-processing nonsense on (I can't remember the name exactly, something utterly nebulous and sweaty like "deep binaural enhancement"), which was making speech completely unintelligible through the speakers.

@0xabad1dea the Windows troubleshooting / documentation link stuff has gotten so dire in the last few years. so much stuff just opens up Edge (never the default browser) and sends you to Bing, often with the complete wrong query. totally miserable quality control.

also reading this and mentally betting on it having one of those horrible audio vendor stacks with the mandatory tray app, like Waves Audio or whatever. they *always* cause source switching problems, and uninstalling breaks all audio.