palordrolap

Two. kbin.social and kbin.run (which was actually an Mbin by the time it vanished).

The on-board sound died on my old PC a while back. There was a free slot on the motherboard that looked like it might take an old sound card, so I found one for cheap online.

Installed it. Fingers crossed. Linux (Mint in this case) didn’t bat an eye. It worked fine.

My newer PC is budget and has barely any slots on the motherboard (pretty sure there isn’t one that supports the same card), so I’m hoping I won’t need to pull that trick a second time.

Other potential solutions:

Sound via USB or Bluetooth.

HDMI and DisplayPort carry sound as well as video, and there are ways to tap into that.

YouTube change things on the back end so frequently that I bet there’s always at least one bleeding-edge distro that has an outdated yt-dlp in its repository.

But if you’re on a Debian / Ubuntu / Mint, yeah, you’re gonna have a bad time without the stand-alone version.

The posts that I’ve seen so far seem to be lacking context that’s available when visiting the original on the home instance.

That is, these posts look like the first comment made by the OP in a thread below their main submission, but the main submission isn’t visible.

Very disorienting. I hope there’s a fix on the way.

Once upon a time, my computer’s hostname was 1x4x9. The case was a black tower, the first non-beige PC case I’d ever owned, so the name seemed to fit. Unfortunately, that hostname went out of use in 2010, long before I switched to Linux at home.

*Confused LMDE noises*

(The funny answer is that I’m somewhere up Mount Stupid, but if I am, it’s a bit like Everest base camp and there’s a nice fire going. I think I’ll stay here for a while.)

Either that or this thread and others like it have caused the hug of death from well meaning visitors. Whoops.

For the lazy: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

It’s working for me right now. Unsure if Tobias happened to visit during (or shortly after) maintenance, or if he’s region locked.

The Mastodon thread explains it. GNU.org was being attacked by a botnet and the automated protection excluded many legitimate visitors. They’ve since dialled it back.

Edit: unnecessary word

I once heard about someone accidentally pouring tea from a teapot into a mug with instant coffee in it rather than hot water.

Your laptop has the GPU equivalent of that drink.

As someone who is firmly in the greybeard mould, I ain’t shaving my legs for this.

I seem to remember having little to no trouble with the 5 to 6 transition on my old system, so I’m inclined to believe that.

I just need to get my head - and backups - in order for the day I decide go ahead with 6 to 7, just in case it doesn’t go smoothly.

The SI prefix thing stems from a joke anyway. Allow me to trot out the etymology again:

Once upon a time in the 1980s, there was created a program for reading ELectronic Mail called Elm.

Someone created a rival mail reader called Pine, which followed both the tree pun as well as the fact it was a recursive acronym: “Pine is not Elm”.

Pine had an editor called the Pine Composer or Pico for short. Pico is both a typographical term as well as an SI unit. They may have been going for both. Too perfect a pun to pass up, perhaps.

Due to licensing uncertainty, someone else created a from-scratch clone of Pico called Nano, cementing the continuation of puns, but in the SI direction.

And then apparently someone else has decided to get on the bandwagon with Micro.

At the risk of invoking the ire of two communities, why shouldn’t we think of Micro as Emacs but with Lua instead of Lisp?

Well that’s something to keep an eye on.

That said, I’m on LMDE6 which is firmly stuck on the 6.1 LTS kernel branch, so I might not see any problems until I upgrade to LMDE7 and get 6.12 (or go nuts and install something else entirely).

General advice follows. I may be preaching to the choir. Apologies in advance.

Did take a backup before running the update? If not, now would be an excellent time to reboot to externally hosted media and get what you can off the storage before proceeding any further.

If you have a backup, be ready to format and install the new OS from scratch then repopulate necessary files from that. You might not need to if you’re lucky and a reboot and retry all goes to plan, but still something to bear in mind if it hangs again. And maybe a third time.

Also be ready to have to reinstall the old OS if this is a case where the new OS and the old hardware refuse to get along.

Old man ramble: Back in the old days, it used to be possible to tell if a computer was doing something because the HDD would make noise, but with SSDs that’s all but impossible to do. HDD/SSD lights on the case sometimes give strong hints that something is happening, but, in my limited experience, they didn’t always match up one-to-one with what a HDD was doing, so I assume the same is true with SSDs. Onion on belt, etc.

I’ve bounced a few ideas off the limited models currently provided for free online by DuckDuckGo, but I don’t think I have the space or RAM to be able to run anything remotely as grand on my own computer.

Also, by the by, I find that the lies that LLMs tell can be incredibly subtle, so I tend to avoid asking them about anything I know nothing about, so that when they lie about the things I do know about, I can gauge how wrong they might be about other things.

Whereas Windows is the clap.

Maybe it’s the (default) configuration on my distro, but info bash is the same information as man bash but with no bold text for headings and things. Ironically, I think I’d have to sit down with man info or info info for an hour or two before I could figure out how to get that formatting to show up in info.

FWIW, most if not all bash builtins turn up when searching in man bash for [four spaces]command-name[space], but as someone else points out, the help command also er, helps.

Most of the *fetches (and clones by other names) have an option for showing a different distro’s logo without having to go through any major changes. neofetch, moribund though it is, has --ascii_distro for that purpose (Weird choice of an underscore in an option. Most programs use more hyphens to separate words in long options).

This did get me to install screenfetch (superseded by plain old fetch but realised that too late for this comment), cpufetch (a year old, still in active development) and archey4 (likewise) after I did a bit of research on similar programs though, so maybe the sirens got me one way or the other.