Neat. I love Debian, but its documentation is crap! I hope this works out and I can see an improvement.

Maybe it’s because I only use stable on my laptop with Flatpaks, but honestly, Bookworm never got that crusty to me until recently - it feels like new software versions didn’t introduce a lot of must have features in the past two years. Only hiccup was I had to install the backports kernel to get Wi-Fi working.

I used to use this, but I always found it really janky - window boundaries not updating, weird graphical glitches, etcetera.

It was especially annoying to use with Photoshop and GPU acceleration (I do GPU passthrough to my VM).

In the end, I just abandoned it and just used the monitor the VM’s GPU is plugged into.

As a completely new user who’s self-described as “not very tech savvy”, Arch is probably a terrible idea, and you should switch distros.

I really like Debian, but something like Linux Mint or Fedora might be wiser for you; all three hold your hand more, which would be very important in your case. Fedora and Debian specifically are designed to work well with KDE, although Fedora will have newer versions.

You certainly seem willing to learn (you got through the Arch install process), and I think you still have a great opportunity to enjoy Linux, but considering you’re calling the terminal emulator “Konsole”, your self-description is probably apt. FYI Konsole is just one application to access the terminal, kind of like how Firefox and Chrome are both web browsers, but you don’t use “Chrome” to refer to web browsers.

Also used it before, for Rounds I believe.

You’re right that it was power-related - one of the options was an ASPM modification - but the issue seemed to be common to this chipset accross laptop brands.

The fix I used came from this post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=286109

My machine was a Thinkpad, but this article was also talking about problems on HP, Asus, etcetera. I think the 8852BE might just be cursed

To be fair, I was using an E series Thinkpad, but in my defense, the E series seems to have improved a lot in the past few years - this was luckily the only issue I’ve had. I’ve had much more difficult times with Linux on other laptops. Heck, even my desktop had more setup than this when I was first starting out, though it was because I was using a Broadcom Wi-Fi card, as I also dual-booted with a Hackintosh and macOS only supports Broadcom Wi-Fi chipsets.

Otherwise agree, but I did run into pain with Realtek on my Thinkpad - the module would sometimes crash and disconnect entirely (on a PCI-e level) from the system.

I did manage to find a fix, but I would not recommend Realtek to someone.

I once experimented with something similar, except it was supported to trigger my smart speaker and drop into another part of the house to tell me.

Honestly, I really need to replace my proprietary smart speaker system with something self-hosted; it’s just I only recently have had the time to start cinsidering.

Vulnerabilities certainly do exist, but I’m pretty sure the attacker has to be well-equipped

I’d call it a protection against data getting cracked in a petty theft, but if your attack vector is much more than that, there are other measures you should probably take. I think Clevis also works with Yubikeys and similar, meaning the system won’t decrypt without it plugged in.

Heck, I think I know someone who just keeps their boot partition with the keys on it on a flash drive and hide it on their person.

In my case, no; it’s all a single machine - it is in the initramfs and uses the system’s TPM to (relatively) securely store the keys.

It can be set up with an attestation server, but you certainly don’t have to do it. The Arch wiki has a really good article on getting it set up.

I use Clevis to auto-unlock my encrypted root partition with my TPM; this means when my boot partition is updated (E.G a kernel update), I have to update the PCR register values in my TPM. I do it with my little script /usr/bin/update_pcr:

#!/bin/bash
clevis luks regen -d /dev/nvme1n1p3 -s 1 tpm2

I run it with sudo and this handles it for me. The only issue is I can’t regenerate the binding immediately after the update; I have to reboot, manually enter my password to decrypt the drive, and then do it.

Now, if I were really fancy and could get it to correctly update the TPM binding immediately after the update, I would have something like an apt package shim with a hook that does it seamlessly. Honestly, I’m surprised that distributions haven’t developed robust support for this; the technology is clearly available (I’m using it), but no one seems to have made a user-friendly way for the common user to have TPM encryption in the installer.

I’m pretty sure by default, virtual networks are not enabled automatically if you’re not using virt-manager GUI.

To make it run automatically, run the following: virsh net-autostart default

If it’s not that, just to make it easier to find information, what’s your host distro? I’m guessing by mention of Kickstart files that it’s something Red Hat related, possibly Rocky 9 based on your choice of guest.

Weird. It must be that my taste is very indie/alternative. You can always also check if the artist has their own shop.

That’s how Jonathan Coulton does it. They Might Be Giants does it as well (in addition to a Bandcamp), but most of their stuff from 1990-1996 is stuck on their former label, so they can’t sell DRM-free audio, only vinyl and/or cassette.

Do you have FluidSynth installed? I had similar issues recently - I just have a script that restarts pipewire automatically on login.

PS5 controller also works.

I booted Buildroot with kernel 5.17 on a Pentium II laptop off a CD I burned once - I needed to dump a drive once and that was the only hardware I had on hand that could dump 2.5” IDE drives and had a working CD drive so I could boot something other than the operating system installed on the drive:

Honestly, I rather like the default XFCE terminal. In fact, I was using it even before I used XFCE back when I was just playing with the default GNOME in VMs before I daily-drove Linux.

Is this xfce-winxp-tc? I ‘ve played with it before and it’s awesome.

However, I don’t use it because while the XP start menu replica is cool, I need a Win7-style search bar, and Whiskermenu sticks pit like a sore thumb here.

I think a 7 replica would be awesome, but I think some parts of Aero can only truly be replicated with a new WM and DE, such as the color changes in the taskbar for different applications. Many themes just fall short - proportions and effects are slightly off and such.

I think the main other distro I used in that VM at that time was Fedora 37 at that time, which should have also been using Wayland. I had made the VMs because I was working on Debian packaging for an application I liked and wanted to make sure the modifications I made didn’t break it on other distros.

I’m not necessarily a “Wayland is the embodiment of evil” kind of guy, but I love XFCE and pretty much won’t leave it unless it dies, meaning I’m on Xorg until they port XFWM4.

Not really, but I switched from Qwerty to Workman years ago, though I can live with Qwerty if I have to when it’s on someone else’s machine.

I use Workman because I found Colemak rather hard to learn, mostly because of the position of S being one over from where it was on Qwerty.