Personally, I am fine with the underlying pulseaudio startup mechanisms being used. However, regarding pulseaudio-equalizer annoyance, I hate to give anyone a headache I have, but...
I was looking at my above linked post, which worked to start pulseaudio-equalizer-gtk with firefox as user spot:
viewtopic.php?t=7615
Prior to making that post using sudo -u user, I was originally mucking about with su - spot command, but all the display stuff and xdg stuff would have needed done and also there was something weird about simply running the command:
It took ages and gave an error message. I have no idea what is causing the delay - I don't get any such delay in KLA (my Arch-based Distro). Indeed I notice that if you logout of KLV and then login as different user, there is quite a long delay when it seems to just sit there - again, that delay doesn't occur at all in KLA. What causes it?
So that issue is one headache. The other one is that that the command sudo -u user was just something I tried after consulting "man sudo", not knowing what it would do exactly, but surprisingly worked, including gui commands thereafter finding root desktop's X display. Truth is I know not much at all about sudo so don't know the ins and outs of how it works. Do you?
But the main headache I have is that if I try that same command on the other distro I use a lot (Zorin) trying "sudo -u username" command just results in a sudo help page, so the command not being accepted as a valid command in Zorin it seems...
As I say, I am fine with the overall pulseaudio enabling setup for root user (via /root/Startup) and normal users (via /etc/xdg/autostart) - it is pretty much the same I also use in KLA (Arch-based), except I actually start root user's pulseaudio in /root/.config/openbox/autostart (using pulseaudio --start), which has the benefit that when I switch to normal user desktop that pulseaudio instance gets automatically killed when root desktop exited.
So two matters to think about:
1. how does command "sudo -u spot" actually work in KLV and do what it does (correct Xdisplay and so on), and
2. why is there such a long delay after Logout and trying to login as, say, user spot at the console? It is not a huge delay, so it is fine really, but just wondering what causes it.
I simply don't know the answers to either of these questions of my own. The overall pulseaudio setup itself seems fine to me though.