“We do not break userspace.” ~ Linus Torvalds
I would always argue that any distribution which does not prioritize this principle is a hobby project, not a serious distribution for end users.
Which is fine, hobby projects are good, but they should be labeled accordingly to properly set user expectations.
Linus likes to break driver interfaces every other Tuesday though. Meaning you can get stuck on an old kernel version, depending on your hardware. This happens pretty regularly for ARM based boards for example.
“Kernel regressions” was a little bit too generalizing in this meme. Technically drivers that became part of the kernel can also regress, as recently seen by users of Corsair Void wireless headsets (an unpatched 6.13 kernel is panicing once the headset adapter is plugged in).
Does the headphone use bad vendor/product ID? Or how does a wireless dongle without driver panicking a kernel?
Or is there just a broken driver in the kernel?
Broken driver. It now seemingly attempts to read the current battery status, and while doing so literally locks up (not sure what “locking” means in context of a Kernel, but it’s somehow involved).
Interesting! Do you have checked the kernel log (there should be a backup from last session somehow iirc) , and do you know the name of the kernel module as well as your kernel version?
I want to check that code out if I see where it fails exactly
Or have you documented that issue already somewhere?
Already reported with a patch incoming.
😍🫡thank you for your service
Instead of donating to the distro, consider donating directly to the software projects you’re using.
Distros write a little software as well, but mostly distribute software written by others.
Both deserve our attention and donations, please don’t try to divert people from one important FOSS project to another.
90% of distros could vanish tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost. Without the software they are packaging, the ecosystem would vanish.
Without distros there would be no Linux desktop ecosystem to begin with. Also who’s to say what true value is?
Every distro comes with people who don’t just maintain their own stuff, but contribute to the whole ecosystem. It doesn’t need to be a Debian or Arch to be worth something.
So again, please don’t start bickering about what’s most important. It all got its place, and someone calling for donations for good thing A does not undermine good thing B. All good things need attention.
deleted by creator
Manual firmware updates
As someone who’s work laptop no longer has Wi-Fi since the automatic firmware update, I like my updates to be manual.
I’m going to piggyback off your comment to take a moment to complain about System76 computers, which I own and enjoy. That being said I wanted to run Fedora instead of PopOS.
It’s super frustrating to me that many of my old computers could automatically do firmware updates using fwupd, but to update System76 laptops I have to install from a copr repo their system firmware update service.
The funny thing is they do appear to support fwupd, I assume they just aren’t maintaining it.
A Linux laptop for Linux people, but they’ve managed to set it up where you don’t get the best experience unless you’re running PopOS. It’s little frustrations like this that make me want to go back to a Del laptop for my next computer.
System76 can’t feasibly support all the linux distros and their different versions. Especially an unstable cutting edge distro like Fedora. It’s too much for such a small company.
back to a Del laptop
Does Dell still offer laptops with official Linux support?
My ask here is for System76 to use a popular and shared tool by many Linux distributions to do firmware updates (fwupd) instead of rolling their own solution only installed by default on PopOS.
I’m not sure if a Dell still offers Linux support out of the box, but you can still easily install firmware updates on multiple Linux distributions using fwupd.
Supporting existing standards sounds good but it doesn’t really seem to help improve things.
Even though I only really use it on one machine, (mnt pocket) I’ve contributed repeatedly to Debian. It’s the bedrock upon which so much of the Linux ecosystem is built upon.
Supply chain attacks and software patches
Sometimes you get your own grenade to take care of as a user.
donates to Redmond
😾
I would say Fedora, but it has a really annoying OOM freezing issue.
Is that why my server keeps locking up?
I’m not sure if I can donate to LixOS, yet…
