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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I’ve been living on Tumbleweed KDE for about a year now, and I love it. My mum recently got a new laptop, so I decided to make it a dual boot of Windows 11 LTSC (no Copilot or forced MS accounts) and Fedora KDE.

    Apparently Windows doesn’t ship with the relevant network driver built-in, so that was fun to hunt down while Device Manager didn’t announce what network card was in there. The manufacturer’s site lists a certain driver as the “latest”, and that would “successfully” install without actually doing anything. Half an hour later, it turns out that pressing “more” on their website shows previous versions of the driver… and drivers for a totally different network card that also gets shipped with this laptop sometimes. Naturally, the hidden one worked first try. Most other drivers were borked too, so Windows Update had to fetch them.

    I then got to set up Fedora, which I chose because from what I heard it’s neither boring nor too bleeding edge, without Canonical’s controversial Snap shenanigans and with some relatively easy enabling of proprietary codecs (which I still need to verify) and with okay package management through Discover. The network card and everything else worked perfectly out of the box, but I have never installed Fedora before and forgot to partition the drive in Windows beforehand. Eventually I finish the install, install some apps and do some updates (while feeling uncomfortable with having to guess how package management works in dnf). I’m finally done, shut the laptop, bring it down to show her, open the lid, screen comes on…

    … and then it shuts off. Turns back on, flickers a couple times, then permanently shuts off. Turns out there’s a kernel bug around display power saving that’s causing this, and I don’t know when the fix will land on Fedora.

    It’s been real fun trying to explain to her that I didn’t just break her fancy new laptop every 15 minutes and that everything I did was just a conventional procedure that should be supported (I’m lying)



  • Learn of YouTube, go to youtube.com and there’s content.

    Learn of Mastodon, ask “where’s that?” and be told to go to joinmastodon.org. When I did this, you had to pick an instance. mastodon.social was full, you had to find something else. So you look at every instance there is in the list, and try to filter for moderation rules as you’re told this is best practice. Don’t worry, all of Mastodon can see everything posted by everyone on every instance! Picking an instance is really choosing where your values are best aligned, nothing more. So you spend the effort, make an account, get asked a reason why you’re signing up (though I might be mistaking this memory for when I signed up to Lemmy), have to wait for approval, get an account, and sign into the official app…

    … and there’s no content. The only way I ever managed to get content was to learn of Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon and manually look them up. So I ended up following a whopping 3 accounts, one of which being some EU governmental account, another essentially being the XDA RSS feed. Needless to say, I didn’t stick around.

    I don’t know if things have improved since then, or how Bluesky does things. But I’d imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.