First I purged cinnamon. That took a while but now espeakup works without plymouth. Next with sighted assistance from two people I got the boot order straightened out with usb and dvd included on it before the nvme real estate. I found alsa has several problems working with mplayer vlc mpv and audacious. It appears audacious may only work with pulseaudio which also had so many problems on the machine I purged pulseaudio. Sockets cannot be created when I try having media players stream web sites. I'm thinking it may be time to clean the disk and do a correct installation from the get go rather than discover the rest of alsa's problems.
