I just installed Linux Mint 22.2 Cinnamon on my Librem14… So far I’ve noticed that it doesn’t show anything to do with battery power - just AC power, there’s light audio static via my wired headphones and it doesn’t suspend properly… If there are fixes or work-arounds I might consider trying them - my spirit isn’t sufficiently broken just yet to go back to Ubuntu… But I’m not exactly impressed with this either - do computer software people know that this is the 21st century? Amateur-hour ended more than a quarter of a century ago…
Is there a Linux distro that just works? Is PureOS well liked here? Do Librem laptop users recommend it? I tried it for a short while when I got my laptop but it was a pain to install whatever I was trying to install whenever that was - early 2022? At which point I just swallowed my pride and installed Ubuntu…
Upon restarting this morning the Power something in Linux Mint is showing that a battery is present and functioning in my laptop…
Thank you for the suggestions - although I’m not quite sure what to make of Windows. Do I come across as that much of a masochist?
Edit: Something I attempted but failed at just prior to installation was to make provisions (suitable spare partitions) for one or more other operating system installs. Should this even be attempted with full disk (or is that “whole partition”) encryption? How does one jury-rig access to a single home folder from multiple OSes?
Do you know what battery you have installed? Is it 4-cell or 3-cell? You can get some battery information with the terminal command cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/uevent. Also, do you know when the battery appears or disappears, like the battery capacity percentage?
About 10 years ago when I was bored I used to see how many distros I could install on one laptop and I used grub to choose which one I wanted for that day. The fun part was trying to get each one to use the same common home directory. Some wouldn’t play that game and insist they have their own home. Some were security oriented and it was intentional so I could not blame them.
I was also using Linux MInt for quite a while. I think when they went to 22.0, is when I had some issues due to the way that they use Ubuntu and convert it to Linux Mint, there were some software packages that needed to be downgraded and I couldn’t deal with it.
I decided to just skip Linux Mint and go right to the source and just install Debian 13 with Cinnamon Desktop. EVERYTHING works and I’ve never been happier.
But Windows will always have something to make of you. Per the terms of service, to the extent that Cortana can determine your dating profile status, she will, and will use it against you, exactly as you would have agreed to in the terms.
I installed PureOS. When I want to install applications, either they are freedom-supported applications that are included in apt package manager, or else I assume they are bad and are not freedom supporting. Ergo, I have trained myself to install applications with command line using apt install whatever, and as a result I generally notice no difference between PureOS and Ubuntu for my purposes, but on PureOS I feel better about life and about the fact that I am using a GNU distribution supported by the FSF, which to me is a good idea and I rather like that.
If I were to replace my Librem 14 and could not bring over the same hard drive, I would again set up the computer by:
Go into terminal and sudo apt install mate or mate-desktop or whatever it’s called, to get the MATE fork of GNOME2. It looks better and I feel more likely to get work done than with GNOME3. Then I would set this as my default by logging out and back in.
Edit the grub configuration to disable ipv6 networking, since ipv4 networking was invented by smart engineers whereas ipv6 was invented by corporations to take advantage of you. If there was something wrong with ipv4, the world would have stopped using it by now.
Mask and disable all services related to avahi and geoclue. From time to time I enjoy monitoring the network traffic going to and from my device, and these services are extremely noisy. They are the functional equivalent of yelling whenever you enter a room, or talking to all the people you encounter who don’t talk to you. “Hi! I am Bob! Hi! Hi I am Bob!” every few seconds (or in the case of geoclue, it’s more “Hi! I am Bob, can world order government please tell me my location on a map? Hey! Hey world order government, where am I? Can you tell me my location please???” which are silly. [This configuration was historically more important on Librem 5 than on Librem 14, but really it’s a problem either way.]
Disable automatic time synchronization. If my computer needs to know the time, I’ll click Time and Date and set it.
Install a better web browser than firefox, or else change the firefox setting to include an automatic ad blocker. Ads are mind cancer. Obviously if we wanted to live consistent with the ideas of the FSF, we would use a browser that had JavaScript disabled, but the internet doesn’t work that way and so web browsing typically involves compromising on ideological values for me. [I will not elaborate on “better web browser” than Firefox because I have my doubts about the one that I use, and perhaps it is not so good, and I doubt people will agree anyway.]
Set a hotkey to open terminals. This can be ALT+ENTER or Super+ENTER. I like if whenever I push a button, a terminal opens.
For me this is a good way to set up a reasonably good GNU environment using PureOS on my Librem 14, although I might have forgotten one or two things. If you’re up to the task, consider uninstalling GNOME so you can’t accidentally use it.
What this doesn’t do:
This type of configuration isn’t good if you want QubesOS style of security. I have not personally tested Qubes and it is probably much more secure. I live with the assumption that world order governments have used zero day vulnerabilities to already compromise my device and all devices, so for me security is more about not leaking information to corporations that they admit to me leaking. If the government wants my data, their agents will appear at my door and torture me until I give them all my data. They are the government, so when doing that kind of torturing, they will win. There is no escape from society at large. I prefer facing the knowns rather than unknowns. This means running freedom software which I am allowed to audit.
This type of configuration – same deal with the Librem 5 – is better for a more skilled user. Android and iOS assume that you will download apps from people you don’t necessarily trust and so they have to be isolated and each run in containment, and that is “security.” If you’re going to download and run code you don’t trust, then using a Librem 5 or Librem 14 is putting yourself at a higher “security risk” than using an Android.
I don’t typically install flathub flatpaks nor snaps (snaps are hilarious, if you watch your internet traffic they are like geoclue, always calling home all the time, “hey buddy, heyyy are there any updates to my snaps? oh hey buddy what about now? Maybe now???”). If the software didn’t go through the audit process to get into debian, and then the further audit process where PureOS folks rip it back out of debian, and it doesn’t stand up to that level of scrutiny, then what’s really going on in there?
If a guide online tells me to download a program and run that program, generally I do not do this. If they tell me to run curl example.com | bash or something similarly “easy” that involves downloading code from them and invoking that code prior to reading it, generally I do not do this. It is not hard to use wget or curl to copy down the script they ask you to run without running it, and then search it with grep http file to see where it downloads contents from. Or, if it is hard, maybe they wanted it to be hard – why did they do that?
If a guide online tells me to download a GitHub repo and build and compile and install that GitHub repo to solve a problem, generally I do not do this. Often I will audit the repo first, looking at what sort of build system it uses or using grep -R http * in the repo to dump out what URLs the repo will access, to gather an understanding of what online locations are downloading binaries or source code for building and running the allegedly “open source” application. Remember that GitHub is entirely owned and run by Microsoft corporation, so if you download and execute software from GitHub you pretty much may as well be using Microsoft Windows in terms of computer security.
Where what I am doing fails:
Firefox keeps (or would at times keep) and always-open connection to Google Cloud for the duration of time that the browser was open. Developers on projects like LibreWulf were adamantly angry with anyone who didn’t like this always-open connection to Google Cloud, in a manner that seemed almost illogical – this suggests the possibility that these people are required to do certain things and not admit what they are doing, under penalty of treason from the US government (which it would be illegal for them to admit if this were happening). Or at least, to me that is far more logical than how the people were acting in posts that I have seen online. With this in mind, there’s an obscure way to maybe change where or what Firefox keeps its always-open connection to, but the existence of this connection brings into question my theory that PureOS is auditing stuff.
Sometimes I use OBS browser to record my screen. However, OBS always always calls home to the personal website of one of the project contributors, who managed to get code included to always call home to his personal website (at least in PureOS Byzantium). I’m not aware of a way to disable it, and when people questioned him, he said it was for a good and necessary reason, so it’s probably not going to be removed from the software. But you can see how similar to the always-open connection to Google Cloud present within Firefox, if I had forked OBS to make my own thing you could picture how my version would probably not be calling home to the personal website of an OBS developer. And so, in that case, it means that these allegedly free programs are not always doing what I want them to do.
I like gentoo. Because i can compile my own Distro on a low level, and mix github codes into. However it have a lag of folks and supporters. Upper level Mainstream is Archlinux or nixOS. If you know what you do and can connect a minimal code base, you fit your source code together. Gentoo is an a slightly higher level as LFS.
As a note, every time you download a source code from GitHub, even if that is from a very well known and trusted project, Microsoft could inject a malware into that sourcecode that you would only find if you bother to read [the specific copy of it that you downloaded]. Normally we think this is impossible because we use HTTPS and other security to verify that what we receive came from the trusted server sender and that what we receive is not tampered with. So you would assume that what you downloaded is the same as what you see on GitHub’s web-based repo browser. But that only detects tampering from the internet hops along the way between Microsoft’s GitHub Servers and You. Because the other side of the connection is itself Microsoft, we’re using the “trust me bro” that Microsoft is going to give you the code that you think they will give you. Lots of systems for example the rust dependency managers will download and compile projects from GitHub without even asking the user if they want to download from there, and they treat it like it’s a good thing because it’s “easy.” But this essentially offers Microsoft a free back door to invade the computer of any person compiling a rust program that uses that sort of build system – and rust is not alone in doing this.
So, back a bit on topic, although I am certainly OK using PureOS as my distribution on my laptop, I do so knowing that it is at my own risk and I should be thoughtful about what programs I run on my computer, because I have all the power. And there are large corporations who would like me to hand over that power to them because it’s “easy.” Ubuntu is OK with that and supports those corporations unless people complain to a large degree.
Edit:
As an additional note: according to 30-50 gentlemen who are current and former US government employees, the United States government has made contact with another species from elsewhere in the universe and has been hiding this secret for 70+ years. With this humbling fact in mind, we might not have very long left as our species to use our computers or to exist in a form that we ourselves recognize, because the other more advanced species might alter our evolution in a manner to benefit themselves. As a result, when we learn more about computers and how best to use them, it might be the case that everything we ever knew and loved is going to be destroyed, and so avoiding the bad unethical machines might be more of a waste of time than we give it credit for, because the corporations using those machines to abuse us are also going to be destroyed. But maybe not. It seems possible that They will only destroy us if we create advanced forms of travel capable of traveling to where They came from, and otherwise do not care about us (at least not in the form that we have capacity to care for each other).
But the large corporate push to create increasingly advanced Artificial Intelligence – if it is true that these technologies will increase the rate at which we make scientific breakthroughs – might increase the probability of Them choosing to intervene in our existence, which is possibly a good reason to discourage the development of Artificial Intelligence, and instead to live as humans in a way that we already know did not beget any obvious intervention in the last 100000 years. Nukes are also not a good technology, and are said to quickly get the attention of Them, because their mission here is to look for energy signatures to make sure we do not obtain sufficient energy to travel to Where They Came From.
That’s a tangent, but with any technology we use it at our own risk. It’s possible that someone else is watching, and when we choose which Linux Distribution to use, we do so at our own risk.
I was discussing my computer woes with a friend - he mentioned that some wifi operation can cause a wake-from-sleep / suspend. So I turned off wifi before trying to suspend again - it’s working now.
I’ve been having a similar “faulty” suspend experience on my old Ubuntu NUC system (while my laptop has been out of action…) - turning off wifi before suspend also worked there.
How would that help? Microsoft will send my git client something that purports to be an exact image of the original repo but has some extra stuff thrown in
The cryptographic hashes of the affected commits would change and git would complain about it. A complicating factor would be whether the repository owner ever does rebase for commits already pushed.
Even amending a commit message creates a new commit with a new hash. It is very difficult to corrupt a repository without detection.
This may be true if you are pulling in an update to an existing repo, but if I’m just average joe who read online to clone a repo and build it myself – who is running commands without reading them – when I freshly clone a repo and use it one time, what’s to stop microsoft from sending a repo with an extra commit in there? If you don’t humanly spend the time to make sure your commits match “what they are supposed to” from online, how would you notice?
[Edit]: I’m not doubting in the cryptography. I’m doubting in the ethics of Microsoft Corporation.
Nothing is risk free and microsoft has a long history of doing nasty things, but if a repository owner or attentive user detected such a repository manipulation the blowback would be huge and github would likely collapse. Project infiltration by a sock puppet like happened with the xz project is much more likely.
Now that I think about it, they have already kind of ruined git itself by bolting on large binary blob support and getting it accepted. People had already been abusing the ability to track binary data as it was. That stuff should be in a separate repository.
Yes, but i have the Source too. Before and after Compilation and could compair the binaries. However every compiler and running OS before could done it too. Using offline without internet and not snitching Hardware could do it too. Its worth to have some loyal trust in that too. But religion is religion and a cheating selling behavior changing algorithm or friends or advertise to change your behavior is another level.
