True. At my tech helpdesk, I’ve seen people who keep their Macs on very old versions even if their hardware supports much newer (and non-Tahoe) versions and suffer problems because of it.

For instance, the other day, a woman’s Microsoft Office quit working because she was still on Ventura, which no longer gets security updates. This was on what I believe was a 2022 Macbook.

I think something is seriously wrong with Apple’s update system. I mean, the Windows approach is objectively wrong, but automatic update systems need to be at least a bit aggressive.

It’s solidly okay. I wish it were in brush form like Photoshop was, and I wish it were better-optimized; it’s written in Python and a bit slow. I think Photoshop GPU accelerates this.

Still, usable for a lot of things.

For me, as long as Debian still packages it and disables these features, I’ll be fine, but LibreWolf looks more and more tempting these days, and having tried it a bit, I can live with the minor annoyances.

I like to use pythonz in this case; it’s a tool to manage Python installs, and it puts the installs in a directory under your home directory, not affecting anything in the system.

It does build each version from source, which introduces some quirks; I’ve found compilation for some Python versions works better with clang, and sometimes, you need to enable build options.

Still, I think this is a good way to do things; just start whichever Python version you want, and then create a venv with it.

No, I don’t want to spend weeks to learn GDB inside-out, so I don’t have to search online for 15-30 minutes on an AI infested internet every time I want to use it, for each feature I’m using it for that day.

1. Search “gdb cheatsheet” and bookmark it. This looks good, but you have plenty of choices. When you find one you like, you probably almost never have to go to the internet again.
2. Unfortunately, you can’t avoid a search engine while programming; you’re not going to get very far. All you can do is develop your search skills to avoid the slop.
3. If you’re using a statically typed language (C, C++, Rust, etc.) already, basic GDB is comparatively simple. For these languages, not knowing GDB is a bit like an electrician not knowing how to use a multimeter; it’s a matter of necessity rather than “gatekeeping”.

No, I don’t want to gatekeep Linux from “normies”, by making it as user-unfriendly as possible, so I can keep the Linux community a frat club for slur saying techbros.

For your sake, I must emphasize that insulting the people you want help from is not an effective tactic for obtaining help. There are certainly jerks in the broader Linux community, but effectively accusing anyone in this community unable to give you exactly what you want of being a “slur saying techbro” (unless I misunderstand you) is, no offense, an incredibly entitled view to have.

If you wish to make valuable use of internet forums, I would request you take heed of this: www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Anyhow, I wish you luck in your endeavors.

Maybe it’s just I’m a relative noob to build systems, but gosh, do I love Meson.

The documentation’s pretty okay - not perfect, but better than cmake - and it feels like I can actually learn it by example through looking at other projects’ setups.

I can live with using other build systems for other projects, but for personal projects, I’ll always choose Meson. I’ll always push for it if a project I’m working on needs to choose a build system.

You could do signup through a form and just throw a QR code on a poster.

My university Linux Users Group usually uses Crytpad (which is FOSS and seems federated, and has a flagship instance) to create forms for votes, so that might do the trick for you.

Maybe ask around and request to put up posters in a local library?

Also, see if your local university has a group already, and maybe if the age difference isn’t creepy, see if you can hang with them.

If I had any close friends who used Linux, I would install this for April fools.

I mean, that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that’s why Debian’s doing it.

If they were solving just that, then they would have just pushed for something like a reproducible tarball where you can point to a commit, branch, tag, etcetera from which that tarball can be reproduced and not bother migrating their package format.

Debian has a serious ease-of-packaging issue that I’ve witnessed first-hand, and I think they’ve made it clear that it’s moreso the ease factor they’re focused on that the security factor.

Not really. If xz were the issue, Debian would have just switched to a different tarball format like lz4.

This is more about Debian packaging conventions being very archaic and requiring a lot of futzing with upstream tarballs and patches.

Weird. Guess it’s a crazy fluke.

Try e-mailing them. I don’t know about that specific mirror, but I use the University of Arizona mirror, and when issues came up, they got back to me pretty quick about what was going on.

That sounds more like something weird about the card itself than with the driver; “power saving feature” makes me think a faulty hardware ACPI implementation by the card vendor is to blame. I’ve had a similar thing happen with my Wi-Fi modem where it would completely crash and only a reboot would fix it; I too have to do special kernel options to get it working.

Honestly, I’ve been tempted by a Kobo lately; I have a lot of Star Trek RPG and comic book PDFs/ePUBs that I got through Humble Bundle over the past couple years.

Kobo seems like the least horrible brand I can get for a reasonable price with a reasonable screen quality; as pleasantly simple and reliable as they seem, and as nice as electronics re-use is, I’m not sure that one Sony e-reader that’s as old as my younger sibling fulfills my use case.

Though honestly, if you have other recommendations for a Linux-friendly color e-reader, I’d be glad to hear them.

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this.

I’m very squeamish about adding more than the bare minimum external repos, though less so about extrepo stuff. I’m honestly worried this is just going to make it very easy for people to find new ways to break their systems; then again, that may be less likely to happen for the user demographic of Debian, and in the end, that’s no reason not to add a feature this convenient.

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianNet

It’s an official Debian address, and the main page redirects to .org. I think it has more broad use now, but I think it’s often been used for stuff like media codecs they can’t include in the main distro. Often used for side projects.

What GPU model is it? And what distro are you using?

Did you install separate AMD drivers? You’re generally not supposed to do that; it’s just plug-and-play in the kernel and MESA (assuming the version is new enough), and you usually don’t need to download separate drivers.

Also, what kernel flags did you have to use?

It’s just that I’m a bit skeptical any of this is actually the fault of the AMD Linux kernel driver, and I would guess there’s some underlying software or hardware issue like a faulty ACPI implementation on the motherboard. I’m not saying AMD can do no wrong, but in this case, making blanket statements about the quality of AMD GPU drivers may be premature.

As others have said, “stable” and “unstable” have a different connotation in the FOSS world.

Rolling releases probably don’t have more software crashes than their stable counterparts, which is what you meant.

However, some use cases prefer that they are able to use the same config for a long time, and when software updates frequently, system administration can become a cat-and-mouse game of “What config broke this time?” That’s not to say rolling release is bad, but sometimes it’s like using a power drill instead of a screw driver.

Also, I definitely feel like a stable distro is more likely to survive a software update after not using the computer for a few months to a year. Granted, I’ve had a Debian Testing (rolling release) install that did survive an upgrade after a year of non-use, but I’ve also seen Arch VMs that broke after just a couple months of non-use, forcing me to reinstall.

I went into this Phoronix article half-expecting someone to come up with a venomous, nasty comment over even something this mundane.