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73416ba
(Get the code!)
I just discussed this with John. He explained that the motivation for making it per-user was to avoid the problem where some settings are per-user and some are system-wide, and users can't predict which is which.
Now, consider the case where you don't log in at all. You turn on your PC, and at the login screen, the drumbeat sounds much too loud. You wince and turn down the volume. Your parents, hearing you fiddling with the computer, call you away to do something else, so you shut down without logging in. When you start up your PC the next day, what should the volume of the drumbeat sound be? The volume you set previously, of course.
This illustrates that Ubuntu needs a system-level volume setting, regardless of whether there is *also* a per-user volume setting. Even if that wasn't true for volume (for example, if we had no drumbeat at the login screen), it would be true for brightness, keyboard layout, and a host of accessibility options that apply to the login screen.
Now, in many cases a device has only one user account. That's often the case with a laptop, usually the case with a tablet, and almost always the case with a phone. When there is, it would be annoying to have to set each of those settings twice, once for the login screen and once for everywhere else. That's the reasoning behind settings propagating from the login screen to the user session and vice versa.
The point I tried to make is that I don't see any functional difference between that and just having a system-wide volume setting. When B logs in, does the sound volume get propagated from the login screen to B's session, or doesn't it? If it does propagate, then there's no point in momentarily showing B as having a volume that they won't actually have. And if it doesn't propagate, then how do you avoid the annoyance of having to set the volume twice when B's account is the only one?
You could make settings propagate if there is one user account, and not if there's more than one. But that would mean different behavior on different Ubuntu installations. It would introduce unpredictability, exactly the problem that user-specific settings were intended to solve in the first place.