The GPU driver issue would really only be a problem for Nvidia stuff.

I feel like it was more than the package manager whining; I think xorg literally wouldn’t start after the update, although it’s been so long now that I could be misremembering.

Honestly, I probably could have salvaged the install if I’d wanted to without too much difficulty, but it was just a VM for testing distro packaging rather than a daily driver device.

Still, what you say is good to know, and perhaps I should hold back on the Pacman slander. I’ve just been using Debian for around 4 years now and had pretty good reliability; then again, Debian (and most distros, with their pitiful documentation) would probably be very hard to use without Archwiki.

Eh, I disagree with you on Pacman. It could be possible I was doing something stupid, but I’ve had Arch VMs where I didn’t open them for three months, and when I tried to update them I got a colossally messed up install.

I just made a new VM, as I really only need it when I need to make sure a package has the correct dependencies on Arch.

Eh; testing doesn’t break THAT often. Having used it on many of my devices for almost 4 years, I can count on one hand the number of times it broke in a way I had to chroot in to fix it.

This is very unlikely to be because they are using testing.

Still, using Debian Stable is probably a smarter idea for this user.

I like using this on my desktop, but it’s way too easy to trigger this by accident on a laptop, so I disable it on there.

My best guess is that it’s not a Flatpak permissions issue as others are claiming; the software is just trying to use your iGPU (which is usually crappy) instead of your dGPU.

Try taking whatever command you use to start the program and tacking DRI_PRIME=1 on the front. This has often worked for me on applications regardless of whether they’re native or Flatpak.

iOS has been getting a bit buggier for me these past few years, but iOS 26 is a whole other level of bad.

With what Google’s been doing to AOSP, I just hope GrapheneOS and LineageOS can hold on just long enough until we can get some livable solution for Linux phones.

The year of Linux on the desktop was the friends we made along the way…

In practice, Machine Owner Keys are a thing, though it depends on Microsoft still signing shim, I believe.

Having Microsoft in the chain of trust rather than a standards body is rather concerning, though.

Modern hardware absolutely should have an encryption processor; TPM just isn’t great.

Zaphod’s just zis guy, you know?

It gets less essential the more memory you have, though I have 32GB of RAM on my desktop and still have 32GB swap space, which is probably way overkill, but I can afford it for now become I have a 2TB SSD that still has several hundred gigabytes left and could probably have a bit freed. With the memory shortage caused by “artificial intelligence” companies, I may have to go less crazy on the storage now, though.

That just sounds like insufficient swap space, honestly. For part of the summer of 2024, I used a laptop from 2016 with 8 GB of RAM as my man portable devicr. The swap partition size I used was fine for most things but a but small; however, I’d occasionally run Spleeter and run out of memory, leading to the issues you experienced, which were alleviated by just adding a temporary swap file. Before that, I used a gen 1 Surface Go, also with 8 GB RAM.

I don’t like Ubuntu, but objectively, this is probably a hardware issue and not a software issue.

I mean, you can try another distro to be sure, but the chances of it solving the issue are slim.

Wait… It’s a used stick? For future reference, that’s a key piece of information. I’m guessing it had a life before it was a server, making it older than 3 years. Depending on the history of the old laptop, I’d guess there’s a solid chance that stick is just worn out.

I’d disagree on the 16GB part. It’s nice to have, but I think 8GB is perfectly fine for most non-gaming use cases. Heck, a couple years ago, I used a laptop from 2010 with 4GB quite comfortably.

I mean, get at least 16GB if you can, especially in a dev setup, but 8 GB hasn’t murdered that many people yet.

I have an E16 gen 1 AMD that I run in a similar configuration- 8 GB soldered + 16 GB SODIMM. I’ve had no problems.

I’d recommend what others have suggested - try reseating the RAM and run a memory test. Also, what distro are you using, not that it’ll necessarily help.

Most software on that front works. I usually just use Cura for slicing.

Honestly, AV1 software decode isn’t that bad on most recent hardware. My desktop with 2018 hardware does it just fine, and so does my 2023 laptop.

USB Wi-Fi adapters are usually fine. I do have a PCI-E Wi-Fi card in my desktop from my Hackintosh days, though, which has gone unused since my home now has lots of ethernet connections.

I used Linux in a VM and WSL for several years, and I occasionally used it on an old laptop. It was in 2022 on the week I installed Cygwin that I thought, “I do more Linux stuff than Windows stuff. Why don’t I just straight up use Linux?”

I created a test install on a secondary drive, which has now been my main install for years and has been moved to a bigger drive twice.

I got very used to Linux, and Windows gave me no reason to come back.