I had a System76 10 years ago. The customer service was excellent (several months after receiving my laptop, they sent me a replacement keyboard, because they didn’t like the one it shipped with). The build quality was meh, it was a plastic body and didn’t hold up well to wear and tear, but it’s in my closet and still works. I haven’t tried their aluminum bodies.
I now have a Framework. It arrived with trackpad issues, and one of the HDMI adapters didn’t work at all. They shipped me replacements for both at no cost to me (except time). It’s been nice knowing that any other issues I do have can be replaced piecewise. Also I like that the webcam/mic have physical kill switches.
Very nice to read this feedback. I’m very sold to Framework after all the great things posted here. An impeccable customer support like the one you describe means a lot about a company.
Thats pretty much how I‘d do it. Now I need to sort through a decade of old backups and deduplicate them. Also need to distinguish between „loose“ files and program/website structures which usually have different file types inside. Probably need to auto archive them into tar.gz or something.
Let’s start simple: You should consider hoping from Linux Mint to LMDE if you haven’t already.
As a user, you have no obligation to participate in the politics between the Ubuntu and the Mint Development team, but if you’ve followed the controversy and agree that Ubuntu is being a bully, this would be a small yet material way to show support.
what am I missing?
Every Linux distribution has a purpose - a reason its author thought it was worth the effort of creating it. Some are grand, others are silly, etc. When you explore distros, you’re telling the community which ideas resonate with you. Popular ideas will replicate, unpopular ideas will be abandoned.
Also, switching distributions makes it harder for business to ‘capture’ the Linux demographic. The mere act of switching occasionally means that tools to import/export/manage your data stay relevant. This literally fights enshitification.
Finally, and this is a matter of personal taste, but I like trying different versions of Linux for the same reason I try different flavors of ice cream: It’s fun; and even if now and then I get a bad flavor, I feel enriched by the experience.
I was surviving with Ubuntu, I had my complaints but I figured ‘that’s just how it is’ on Linux, that it was the same everywhere. I didn’t even realise what I was missing until I switched.
I got a hardware upgrade at one point, so in order to get those new drivers ASAP I tried an Arch-based distro, with plans to switch back once drivers became available. I never moved back.
The two big reasons I stayed was ironically enough the lack of good Ubuntu documentation, and the PPA system. Ubuntu is used a lot, but there’s not really formal documentation anywhere, only random tutorials online (most likely out of date and never updated) and people on forums talking about their problems. By contrast the Arch wiki is the gold standard of Linux documentation, there’s just no comparison. Even on Ubuntu I found myself using it as a reference from time to time.
Regarding PPAs, the official Ubuntu package list is strangely small so if you’re like me and find yourself needing other software, even mainstream software like Docker, you’ll be faffing about with PPAs. So if you want to install Docker, instead of typing sudo apt install dockerYou instead have to type:
These are the official install instructions, by the way. This is intended behaviour. The end user shouldn’t have to deal with all this. This feels right out of the 90’s to me.
Instead of PPAs, Arch has the Arch User Repository (AUR). Holy moly is the AUR way nicer to work with. Granted, we’re not quite comparing apples to apples here since the AUR (typically) builds packages from source, but bear with me. You install an AUR package manager like yay (which comes preinstalled on my flavour of Arch, EndeavourOS). yay can manage both your system and AUR packages. Installing a package (either official or AUR) looks like yay packageNameHere. That’s it. A full system upgrade like sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade is a single command: yay -Syu, a bit cryptic but much shorter. The AUR is fantastic not just for the ease of use, but for sheer breadth of packages. If you find some random project on github there’s probably an AUR package for it too. Because it builds from source an AUR package is essentially just a fancy build script based on the project’s own build instructions, so they’re super easy to make, which means there’s a lot of them.
You might argue ‘but building from source might fail! Packages are more reliable!’, which is somewhat true. Sometimes AUR builds can fail (very rarely in my experience), but so can PPAs. Because PPAs are often made to share one random package they can become out of date easily if their maintainer forgets or simply stops updating it. By contrast AUR packages can be marked out of date by users to notify the maintainer, and/or the maintainer role can be moved to someone else if they go silent. If a PPA goes silent there’s nothing you can do. Also, since an AUR package is just a fancy build script you can edit the build script yourself and get it working until the package gets an update, too. PPAs by comparison are just a black box - it’s broken until it gets updated.
Moral of the story? Don’t be afraid to just give something a go. Mint will always be waiting for you if you don’t like it.
Edit: Note that the NixOS option puts in the full path to pam_fprintd.so. That’s necessary because NixOS doesn’t put so files in search paths.
Without doing more research I don’t know how to add arbitrary options to pam files in case you run into something that isn’t mapped to a NixOS option yet. The implementation for the pam options is here; there might be something in there that would work.
I copied a program into the /bin/ folder while in a file browser with sudo permissions and somehow overwrote every file except the one I was moving. It, of course, couldn’t boot, but copying the bins from a live iso made it at least boot able. Reinstalled Linux after that, of course.
Not the installation strictly speaking, but my most “funny” fuckup was setting up xfree86. There was a configuration for crt monitor scan frequency that you had to setup. I messed up something and the monitor started to squeel like crazy and quickly hit hard reset in panic.
The monitor didn’t die, but it had a slight high pitch noise to it after.
Back then I was testing modelines to see the maximum I could push to my 14" monitor. I then backed it with a 1200x1600 virtual screen.
My girlfriend got sick from watching me scrolling around and bought me a 19" display which could do that resolution - and ended up frustrated when I added a larger virtual screen.
Yeah, monitors were somewhat dumb, just received and did what the vga output asked to do.
The noise most likely came from the semiconductors that controlled the magnet field that directed the rays onto the screen. These components are selected for a specific speed that the monitor can handle. So going under or over it’s spec can make something resonate in the audible range, and could even destroy the components if stressed too much.
The thing is that for each resolution and refresh rate you had two values to configure, one for the vertical speed in Hz, and horizontal speed in kHz. These values were usually specified in the owners manual. Typos can happen, and this was quite a risky operation.
This one took a stupid amount of time to debug - but on the other hand, when grub failed it did with “can’t find any bootable thingy” and not “missing configuration file” as, in my later opinion, it should.
I wanted to use fio to benchmark my root drive. I had seen a tutorial saying that the file= parameter should point to the device file, so I pointed it at /dev/sda. As you might expect, the write test didn’t go so well.
Still the exploit is easier to avoid compared to windows viruses and stuff. Even with the linux popularity increasing there is already out there good solutions to prevent this kinda stuff like have SELinux installed, use firejail to run suspicious files, use proxies to visit weird sites (you can use proxychains + tor, a bit overkill but works if you don’t have a local proxy), etc.
Not to mention that one of the attack vectors of this exploit requires using a systemd feature which is the sysnetd which isnt going to work on other init systems. Reason why a lot of times minimalism can be superior to just having all the features + unnecessary ones out of the box.
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