Music. Photography. Thoughts.
… and I’m not even in the market for the Apple Macbook Neo. Nonetheless, how “fireborn” approaches it, it’s flawless. And in case you need a notebook (aka laptop) in the price range of slightly abouve 600€ (according to German price search engines), go for it. “fireborn” also tells you if/when you need to spend more than that. So read his review in case you need one.
Like always, thanks for reading.
Larry Cafiero wrote a nice review of Debian 13.3 “Trixie” over at FOSS Force, and I have to admit that Debian is also my standard go-to Linux distribution after years and years of use. I second his mentioning of the XFCE desktop especially for older devices like my wife’s old Lenovo SL500 laptop with only 2GB of RAM and a by now ancient Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and his mentioning of KDE Connect (Gnome has something similar called GSConnect, but the KDE guys invented that one) is also worth consideration. Pretty happy with it, and GSConnect always reminds me when my Pixel phones (6a and 3a) or my new Samsung Galaxy Tab A11+ are fully charged.
If you search my site here for Debian or for Ian Murdock, you’ll find an interview I did with him (RIP Ian), and even my late and not so computer-literate brother Willi (RIP as well) did never look back to Ubuntu after I showed him Debian.
Recommended reading for beginners of GNU/Linux.
After a bit of reading, yesterday I decided to have another fresh look at a browser called Brave. And yes, I knew about the controversies regarding its crypto- and “AI”-integration, and also the ones about its owner. But it’s still one of the better browsers around, so I tried it on Arch and Debian Linux, on Windows 11, and even on my phone (which runs GrapheneOS and which does have a pretty secure Chromium-based browser called “Vanadium” already).
I’m not the typical internet user who is using a browser for pretty much everything, and no “doom scrolling” for me, thanks. But what hit me is that after less than 24 hours, Brave’s built-in tracker stats showed me this:
Almost 3,500 trackers in less than 24 hours? Wow – see the headline of this post… time to regulate the internet, and to “take it back”. A website needs just two things from us as end users: the URL you want to see, and the IP address where it should be sent. No scripts, no cookies, and most definitely no ads and trackers.
Anyway, thanks like always for reading. Oh, and the background photo within the Brave browser is by Anna Wangler, on Unsplash.
Hey and good morning, dear friends and readers of this blog.
This morning after the usual
yay -Syu
line in Arch, I got lots of updates, some 200+ packages IIRC, including a new kernel as shown in my conky as well:
Later, I found this post from Marcus Nestor in 9to5 Linux about Debian – so I went and updated that as well, which also got me a new kernel amongst lots of other things:
What most people who aren’t that much into Linux probably don’t know is that it’s nowadays more and less automatic, like in Windows from versions 10 and upwards – you are notified about new updates, and often they come without much fuss, just by themselves. Lately I also read the old question again of when to reboot after such upgrades, and for me the answer is simple: whenever you get a new kernel or some other really low-level stuff like systemd or GRUB. Some distributions like Debian now automate updates via Gnome, which is a bit too much in my opinion – contrary to the later Windows versioning, this reboots pretty much each time instead of when really necessary. But I digress.
Marius’ article also mentions why and when you should probably download such upgrades – when making new boot images on your USB sticks or elsewhere. So while pretty much all modern distributions update themselves, and you don’t really need such downloads, if – like me – you’re carrying around a bootable stick with some of these images with you in case you’d need to help some friends with these, go for it and download those “point” distributions of monthly images (in Arch), and put them onto your boot media.
Oh, and in case you dual- or even triple-boot like me (yes, I still keep Windows 11 around as well), you’ll have to update your bootloader of choice of course – in my case, that is GRUB on Arch, like this:
sudo grub-install –target=x86_64-efi –efi-directory=/boot/ –bootloader-id=Arch
followed by
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
as documented in the very nice Arch Wiki about GRUB. If you don’t do that, then you won’t see your new kernel in Debian 😉
Like always, thanks for reading, and have a nice day 🙂
This post on Phoronix brought me to the original “Bits from the DPL” message from where I followed Andreas’ link to an interview with him on RadioTux (see more about RadioTux and that interview here). Interesting man, interesting interview, thanks for that, and recommended hearing.
Last week I had a brief look at secureblue, a hardened Linux distribution based on a so-called “atomic” Fedora distribution (called “silverblue” in case you’re interested). I was interested because I’ve read about it on several security-related websites like for instance here or here.
And I liked it a lot, becauise it takes many very good ideas from GrapheneOS, like their hardened Chromium-based browser Vanadium which here is called Trivalent. Even their webpages kind of look alike.
And since I haven’t had a look at a tiling window manager yet, I first tried the “Sway” version. With the <super> and <Enter> keys, you open a terminal window, here called “foot”. Looks like this:
You’ll notice the “us” keyboard, which I couldn’t switch to a German one, except in the login manager which looks like this:
This isn’t a problem of Sway; I later tried that with another distribution where it worked. Maybe some overlay “header” on Fedora’s version was responsible for this, I didn’t find out during my test.
I stopped testing it because neither this Sway nor the KDE Plasma or Gnome based versions of secureblue ran on Mitchie’s old Lenovo laptop which still has a Celeron-class dual core CPU, and only 2GB of RAM. Too heavy for old metal like that. I also can’t do all of my stuff (like music making which requires real time) on such an atomic version of Linux, and with flatpaks.
But in case you want a nice and reasonable secure machine, and have the hardware for it – I recommend a quad core with at least 4GB of RAM – then go for it, and have a look. Could be well worth trying it.
And like always, thanks for reading.
Oh wow – this means the end of an era, at least for me. We have Crucial memory in all of our desktop computers, and in each one I’ve built over the years. And now it will be gone, at least for us “consumers”. Why? The AI craze. And look at this:
That’s what AI – and as such, all of us – are doing to our planet. A lot less trees, a lot more datacenters. This has to stop if we really want to save the planet…
Like always, thanks for reading.
Nice one:
Of course, for most of us, a machine like that would be pure overkill. But it’s about the man here, not the machine.
Enjoy…
… conky is displayed in Arch again, just after login as expected:
I don’t actually know what happened, and what’s the cause that by now I don’t have to restart conky to be displayed (I used Brenden Matthews’ recommended one-liner ‘killall -SIGUSR1 conky’ to do just that until now). And I have to admit that even after all those years in Linux, I still don’t exactly understand Gnome’s initialisation process, with its ‘mutter’ (Gnome’s implementation of the Wayland display server) and so on. What I noticed was that I’ve got extension updates in Gnome, both in Debian as well as in Arch, but that was for the GSConnect extension, which shouldn’t have much to do with how the screen is rendered in my opinion – but as I said, what do I know?
Okay, time to re-edit my (closed by others) bug in Arch which I mentioned in my August post, and to also tell Brenden via Element/Matrix. I’m glad that it works now, even if I still don’t understand why.
And like always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: Update, from less than half an hour later: after a few reboots and re-logins into Gnome on Arch, the behaviour is back to what it was before – meaning that conky is running (I see it with ‘ps waux | grep conky’, but I have to restart it with ‘killall -SIGUSR1 conky’ to have it displayed. Weird (as in fishes)…
And another update, from 2 days later: it worked again for the last two days, and I have no idea why (yet). But whenever I log into Arch, conky is there – displayed as it’s ought to be, like in the picture above. So this will be my last addendum on this case, except if I find out what caused all of this. So, like two days ago:
Thanks for reading.
I can reproduce that with a fresh install of Arch in a virtual machine. Gnome desktop and conky, with conky being put into autostart using the tweaks tool of the Gnome desktop. Have a look:
As the output of ‘ps’ shows, conky is definitely running, but it is not being displayed. Changing anything in its config, and then changing it back and saving that config makes it reload, and being displayed – same as if you ‘killall conky’ and reload it using the meta key and its icon.
Does not happen in Debian Trixie, but even with ps and pstree as well as Gnome Mutter’s ‘Looking Glass’ debugger I can’t figure out where the differences are. Happens only in Wayland, not when logging in using X.
Hints, anyone? Thanks 🙂
Update, from Wed 6 Aug, 2025: filed a bug in Arch concerning this…