Posts

Posted on

First bigger upgrades of 2026

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 🙂

Posted on

Tried secureblue

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.

Posted on

Bravo, Jan!

This. No other comment needed, except that you need to understand German, or that you’ll have to use your favourite translation engine for it.

Posted on

Memory loss, indeed

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:

A photo of the “Stargate I” site in Abilene, Texas. AI data center sites like this are eating up the RAM supply. Credit: OpenAI (taken from ARS Technica’s website)

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.

Posted on

A tip for those who cannot run GrapheneOS…

… because they don’t have a Pixel phone. GrapheneOS is by far the best mobile OS, and its built-in Vanadium is the best browser engine for Android-based phones. But Vanadium only runs on GrapheneOS, so what should users of other systems choose?

That question was recently asked on the GrapheneOS discussion channel, and the answer was Cromite. And indeed, just look at the long list of features needed to make Chrome a bit more private and secure…

You’re welcome.

Posted on

Where the mice live…

We live in a housing area which is rather nice – it has a kindergarten nearby, several playgrounds for kids small and big, and lots of green areas, with bushes and trees. In between, there are some pathways for us humans to walk (and some like to cycle there, too, or ride their – now electric – scooters, or even drive in with cars).

I got up early this morning, before dawn, and let the cat out soon after sunrise. She disappeared on one of those pathways which we can see from our dining area window – and like last time, she was back after less than two minutes, carrying a mouse. I let her in, expecting to find a dead mouse which I could take away from her – but this time, the poor thing was still alive, so there was an inhouse chasing and hunting time for the cat, which she surely enjoyed.

I tried to catch the mouse as well to set it out again, but it ran under my computer desk to hide from that deadly predator. I was thinking about how to save the poor thing – doing nothing meant that it would starve if not moving, or being killed if it dared to come out again. Locking away the cat in another room and then moving my computer desk would mean that I would have to chase it through all of the flat. I also didn’t know how bad it was hurt already, so I thought about the mouse’s status as maybe in-between, like Schrödinger’s cat, of which you couldn’t really tell if it’s dead or alive, so in my thoughts I named that mouse “Schrödinger” already.

As it turned out, my wife was far more clever than me – when she returned home from work, she brought a shoe carton in which we could trap the mouse (after locking away the cat), so I could bring it out again and release it beside some big rock and bush. The mouse looked up at me, and I left it there…

It was the second time that our cat came back from that pathway carrying a mouse in under two minutes, so by now we know where the mice live – but so does the cat…