Not an issue. I did the same thing a while ago, switched from nvidea to amd. After i confirmed the radeon was working fine i purged all the nvidea stuff
There are plenty of reasons to get rid of Ubuntu, but this isn’t one of them.
Before Ubuntu Pro, packages in universe (and multiverse) were not receiving (security) updates at all, unless someone from the community stepped up and maintained the package. Now Canonical provides security updates for universe, for the first time since Ubuntu has been introduced, via Ubuntu Pro, which is free for up to five personal devices and paid for all other use cases.
Debian is actually not that different (anymore). If you read the release notes of Debian 12, you’ll notice that quite a few package groups are excluded from guaranteed security updates, just like packages in universe are in Ubuntu. Unlike Ubuntu, Debian doesn’t split its package repository by security support though.
In both Debian and Ubuntu, only the main repo gets official security updates for free. Ubuntu has a paid option for universe whereas Debian doesn’t have that option and relies on the package maintainer to provide any updates.
I’d still recommend Debian over Ubuntu though, for various reasons.
Package maintainers can be slow to update packages though. Debian have a separate security team that get patches out ASAP, and those packages go into a separate security repo. I imagine Ubuntu does the same. It’s that security team that only deals with “official” packages, meaning anything that’s not in contrib, non-free, or non-free-firmware.
What you’re paying extra for are timely security updates for community-maintained packages that aren’t an official part of the OS. Debian doesn’t provide that for free either. Debian doesnt provide it at all since they don’t have any paid options.
No. All the official packages in the main repo get security updates from the Debian security team.
Only the packages in contrib, non-free and non-free-firmware don’t have official security updates and rely on the package maintainers. These are not considered part of the Debian distro, and I don’t even have them enabled on my servers.
Out-of-the-box, Debian only enables the main repo, plus the non-free-firmware one if any of your devices require it (e.g. Nvidia graphics, Realtek Bluetooth, etc). You have to manually enable contrib and non-free, and by doing that, it’s assumed you know what you’re doing.
In the case of non-free and non-free-firmware, they can be closed source software (like the Nvidia drivers) or have a non-open-source license that doesn’t allow distributing modified versions. In those cases, the Debian team is unable to patch them even if they wanted to.
This has always been the case with Ubuntu. Ubuntu only ever supported its main repository with security updates. Now they offer (paid) support for the universe repository in addition, which is a bonus for Ubuntu users, as they now have a greater selection of packages with security updates.
If you don’t opt-in to use Ubuntu Pro, nothing changes and Ubuntu will be as secure (or insecure) as it has always been. If you disable universe and multiverse you have a Ubuntu system where all packages receive guaranteed security updates for free.
Please note: I still don’t recommend Ubuntu due to snapd not supporting third-party repositories, but that’s no reason not to get the facts right.
Debian has always been the better choice if you required security updates for the complete package repository.
Personally I have my doubts if Debian actually manages to reliably backport security updates for all its packages. Afterall Eclipse was stuck on version 3.8 for multiple Debian releases due to lack of a maintainer …
modern chromebooks are secretly linux under the hood and can run android/linux apps. you could also try remoting into a server for development, like over ssh/vim or via code-server.
And if you open it up and unplug the battery, then boot off the charger that disables the write protect and you can install actual linux, though a lot of chromebooks have unique hardware that might not be supported, particularly audio IME.
I used to have a dell chromebook 11, and with bitmap fonts it was actually a pretty slick little computer for <$100.
Other should stop just using it because it doesn’t work for you? Wouldn’t it make more sense that those who do work on it keep improving it so it doesn’t break?
Boot from a live distro so you can modify your boot disk. Use the disk utility to create partitions. Copy the data to the relevant partitions ensuring to maintain file ownership and permissions. Modify /etc/fstab to mount the partitions at the designated locations in the filesystem.
I don’t bother putting anything but /home on its own dedicated partition, but if you ask 10 people this question you’ll get 12 opinions, so just do what feels right.
Note: Create your partitions from your empty space. You may need to resize your existing partition to do this. But don’t practice on your main drive.
This is a simple job, in that the steps are few, but it’s something that causes catastrophic data loss if you get it wrong.
I’d recommend buying a cheap second drive, doesn’t have to be big or even good. Partition it, mount it, make sure you can make the partitions automatically mount, teach yourself to copy data around, umount it and remount, make sure you got it right.
Just… these are all very simple things. I wouldn’t hesitate to repartition my own drives. But if you fuck it up you fuck it up good. Make sure you know the operations you’re taking first. Measure twice, cut once, all that jazz.
A couple days ago I tried Hyprland just to see what it was like. I've been on XFCE for over a decade and expected to play with Hyprland for a couple hours, go "Huh, that's cool", and uninstall it, but I think the switch may be permanent. It's fantastic
You running anything from nix-hardware on your system? I know my laptop has a flake there that installs a few applications & fixes small things like hardware buttons for the ga401: github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/…/default.nix
I’m running unstable on both machines, with nix-hardware for my laptop only.
I use Ansible for all my deployments and just got a PXE boot set up with a preseed file to automate the install process and get the host ready to run playbooks.
I’ve been really pleased with this strategy overall. I think that Ansible works really well for programmatically generating config files which in turn makes moving applications between servers effortless. I control docker volume mounts with ansible variables and encrypt secrets with ansible vault so I can do everything all in one place.
Troubleshooting issues is a lot easier and recovering from a backup is faster and a requires less effort since I can just pull down the Ansible config from git and redeploy.
I believe a USB WiFi dongle will be a better idea than modifying live images of various distros, and others are already pointing you in the correct way for that, but I feel the need to correct one thing:
Okay, so maybe I can add some driver files to the LiveUSB or something? . . . nope. Not a good idea, because the other part of the whole fix is installing firmware, which has to be in place before the drivers will work – but this chip is also still being used by the onboard Mac OS.
The WiFi module doesn’t have any persistent memory for firmware, which is why the system needs to bring its own firmware - it is uploaded to the chip on every boot as part of driver initialization. So there is no risk of interfering with macOS here.
The installation in the guide refers to putting the firmware in a place where the driver will be able to find it. In other words, you would be installing the firmware on the Linux system, not onto the WiFi module.
I believe a USB WiFi dongle will be a better idea than modifying live images of various distros
Yeah, you and me both. But I’d be willing to do it for one or two, just to be able to prove that THIS laptop can and will run Linux with its current hardware, should he choose install it.
Also, the only thing lost by modifying LiveUSB trials is my time. If I corrupt the image, or it doesn’t work, or I make it crap out somehow – all of which is likely, lol – I still have done no harm at all. It’s just a USB stick. And I will also have learned a few things along the way, like how Linux distros install and use drivers.
you would be installing the firmware on the Linux system, not onto the WiFi module.
Then technically (not that I personally have the chops to do it) this “firmware” could also be something plugged into the distro on the LiveUSB stick along with the wl driver. That distro is getting its current drivers from somewhere on that USB already, so I’m not reinventing the wheel, just adding to what is already there.
I guess I just have to read up more. Thanks for letting me know the difference.
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