by theYogster » Jul 12th, '19, 18:59
ITA84 Thank you again for your interest and assistance.
Logged out of all (2) accounts, then shut down. Power up from a cold start and logged into the root account to discover there STILL is no audio output or input devices found when trying to play a track from YouTube. Even going into the audio settings to test the speakers produces silence. I find this to be highly unusual, but perhaps that is due to the fact that I am new to the ways of Mageia. I've experimented with several other Linux OS distros and never ran into this particular situation which is why I'm surprised to see it here. There does not seem to be any documentation of the fact that root user will not hear audio by default. I looked and could not find any such documents, which brought me to this forum. Apparently I am the only one who finds this lack of audio to be an oddity.
I am also very comfortable navigating about as superuser/root. The risks and dangers are embedded in my mind given that I've experimented with several other OS's and also have some sys admin time on my resume, albeit I've retired many years ago. I'll agree that it's probably a great idea to not be root most of the time, but I do miss being able to do things a regular user would do while I'm root.