Since Windows ME, a system update was always a risk. You never know when some BS like this might happen. It taught me at a young age to turn off automatic updates and only update when necessary and ready to do some troubleshooting.

Thanks for this. Good to know! I haven’t taken the leap yet. I’ll plan the upgrade when we will be on vacation…

This is why I don’t update unless absolutely necessary. I’m only running a local instance so it is less of a security issue. Once I land on a working version, I’m gonna go ahead and stick with that as long as I can.

I was frustrated by this also and decided not to put the effort into rooting the device to get rid of all that crap. Instead I decided to use Flauncher together with Button Mapper. Using that tool, I map the homepage button on the remote to point to Flauncher. It isn’t a perfect solution but it was done in a few minutes and I can now mostly avoid the bullshit ads

To expand on this, I have witnessed small, indie channels have their content copied, processed through AI so it is stripped of audio, watermarks and re-edited. Then it is posted as a new video. When it is reported as a fake, or pirated copy, or not original content, Google then puts the burden of proof on the small indie channel that originally created the content, often requiring them to lawyer up and file a legal complaint, before they will take any action to remove the AI slop. It is fucking absurd. It would only take a real person about 60 seconds to compare the content and dates to determine who is the theif.

I used Ubuntu on an old Surface Pro and it worked really well.

I trialed several distros on my Precision 3550 and settled on Garuda. No regrets!!

I don’t know anything about that but it sounds interesting. If you have any sources for further reading about sandboxing vs paravirtualization, I’d like to read up on it

I find it odd that the author didn’t mention secureblue at all. I wonder why they didn’t consider that option?

Thanks for this! I’m looking forward to trying this. Would you have any recommendations for implementing this on an existing Arch system that’s already LUKS and BTRFS with snapper preconfigured?

I’ve been looking for something like Macrium Reflect for Linux and this sounds like the solution!

Currently I’m just using Clonezilla to image the entire drive on occasion. Your solution seems much more elegant

With great power comes great responsibility

Amen. Glad to hear I’m not the only one baffled that Spotify’s app development is total garbage. It is one app that doesn’t get updated ever - once I have a working version. If it were up to me, I’d happily never use it again

I do too. Though to be fair to OP, Garuda didn’t advise about the vlc problem either. I had to go hunting on my own to figure it out. But anyway, still loving Garuda and it is much less painful than any other OS I’ve ever used.

I use Garuda on my daily driver and I love it. I distro hopped for years and I’m finally home. It’s not hard like trying to do your own Arch from scratch. It’s like some super geek setup Linux for me with all the bells and whistles just the way I want it. I had to ditch the dragon theme and then it was perfect. And snapper is so well setup and integrated with Garuda, there’s rarely a case where a clean install is warranted. I highly recommend it.

That makes sense. Mine is a Kenwood aftermarket unit so maybe its a Kenwood thing

I’d like to hear more about this. When I went to setup Auto on my vehicle, it demanded that I copy all contact information to the head unit, or it would not proceed with pairing and setup. That’s when I just shrugged and disconnected my phone. Bluetooth works just fine for me

I totally agree with your take here. I’d also like to add that I went the Synology route and since it is restricted to my local network, it did not require the creation of an account. Seems like it’s possible to be an anonymous Synology user for now.

I’ve had similar experiences moving to Linux on various machines. I don’t yet understand the pattern. Why do some distros work better on some machines than others?

I have an original MS Surface Pro. Ubuntu works best on it, imo.

I have a 10 year old Asus laptop that has all kinds of seemingly random issues - currently on Mint but about to migrate to OpenSuse.

I have a 4 year old Dell laptop and it likes Garuda the best.

Go figure.

I love Ventoy for this reason. I can try 8 different distros till I find one that works best on a particular machine.

I think it’s also pushing subscription based cloud services. To me, the SD card slot is a convenient backup target when away from home. It fits my 3-2-1 backup strategy. Without it, more people will consider backing up to paid cloud services, like how Apple does it.

For the record, I hate this trend. Hands off my sd slot and my 3.5mm jack. But I also want GrapheneOS or something similar. Can’t have it all…

Bump for an update. What did you ultimately do?

I’m looking for a similar solution