Little update in case you were wondering. After the news of kernel 6.13 being out I decided to look up when that would be available on Fedora. I found some mentions of the display bug being resolved in 6.12.9, and it’s true! Now my saga of switching a parent to Linux can truly begin!

Did you ever end up getting that Brother scanner to work?

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)

Someone I know recently showed me that extension. I replied to them with “why bother with a browser extension, just paste the DOI into Anna’s Archive and it’ll show up 99% of the time” and showed it to them on their computer. It then showed a message along the lines of “you can access this file, but not here. Go to this site instead”.

They were signed into their university account. As you use that extension yourself, do you know if that’s normal behavior? I’m afraid the extension flagged this person at the campus IT department or something like that

I’m excited, even though the odds of me buying the new one in the near future are slim. Between all the Xenoblades, the new X remaster, Prime 4 and my other backlog I already have lots of games I can play on what I own. I’ll wait on the inevitable 3D Mario, and only consider the thing when a new Xenoblade or Metroid launches (or if there’s a day-one exploit, my current Switch is objectively the worst one they made 'cause it’s patched but still with the bad battery life).

That said, the fact that more details regarding backwards compatibility even can be announced is worrying. You’ve already said it plays Switch software, anything added to that can only mean asterisks, right?

Oh boy, does this also hold for people who don’t like any pets?

My grandpa had developed the habit of falling out of his bed. The first time I was afraid that he was gonna die on the spot as I’d heard it, but it eventually became such a “regular” occurrence that I didn’t think of immediate death anymore. This particular day, he’d fallen twice. They brought him to a nearby hospital to get a check-up. I was worried sick that this time something was actually wrong, or that he might’ve broken a bone or something. Turns out he was fine! No broken bones or anything. Just one teeny tiny minor issue…

When he was brought to the hospital, he was accidentally placed in the area with people who were brought there with covid. I hadn’t been able to see him in months because of the restrictions, and even when I did go the months prior it was always with far distance, masks and in short bursts. I did everything I had been told to do to “keep him safe”, “ease up the workload in the hospitals” and all those government campaigns and all that, only for him to die because of this (seeming) serious neglect from medical professionals.

Does this also apply when not using the official app? I recently bought a Phillips bulb (not Hue) and set up Home Assistant for it, along with the Matter bridge. This turned out to also connect it to the Wi-Fi, but I never installed a manufacturer app.

Would blocking internet access via parental controls on the router be enough to mitigate such threats, or is its mere presence in an internet-connected network dangerous?