salacious_coaster

I just spent three hours trying to update the firmware on my Dell dock from a Linux environment. Solution: quietly weep, revert to Windows (for a few minutes to run the .exe from Windows boot disk).

Before anyone starts trying to troubleshoot it, yes, I tried all the things in fwupdmgr. Even went so far as to install snap because Dell's Linux tool required it, and that failed as well.

I finally bailed on Windows to Debian 12 a week ago. I've tried a handful of other distros in years past, but little issues kept me from jumping all the way in (and the one big issue of MusicBee being Windows exclusive and not really operable on Wine; still figuring that one out).

For example, I think it was Manjaro where wifi was inoperable out of the box. Another distro had scaling issues I couldn't resolve. All of them had crappy support for touchpads, making normal operation a chore. Two-finger tap wasn't recognized most of the time, single tap needed an absurd amount of pressure, and I was accidentally zooming every 30 seconds. Debian 12 KDE had intermittent(!) touchpad shittiness, sleep didn't work, fingerprint scanner didn't work, but otherwise everything was workable. Then I heard 13 was coming out soon with updated KDE and I didn't want to wait another few days to see if anything got fixed.

All of it! My Thinkpad works perfectly now, as far as hardware goes. First time I've seen a Linux distro 100% "just work." Half the time I can forget that I switched OSes at all.

If you're hesitating about switching from Windows, Debian 13 KDE is working great for me so far! Go for it!

Edit: well...okay, I guess I spoke too soon on the touchpad and invited egg on my face. The old issues intermittently come back after waking from sleep. Go figure. Hope someone figures that out someday.

Edit 2: reloading the psmouse module fixes it temporarily. At least there's a workaround, but this is one of those "basic functionality" things that are keeping people from adopting Linux.

This particular flower is native to my geographic area, although there wasn't any in my suburban city. So I got a big bag of conservation seed and dumped it everywhere, and it went nuts. Best "weed" ever.

It flowers for most of the season, but it's most magnificent right now. Hoverflies and other tiny pollinators love it. Honeybees do too, but they're a little big for them.

Two of my favorites. The rose smells heavenly

By "unconventional" I mean something other than classical visual or audio arts like painting, sculpture, music, etc.

I've never been a very "artistic" person. But when I took my first programming class, I worked on my code like it was a sculpture. I found beauty in making my code clean, efficient, easy to read, and user-friendly. It still seems weird and affectatious to say, and I wasn't really expecting that kind of experience from that class! It was one of the only times I ever felt "artistic."

But why not? Any medium can be artful.

What's your non-traditional art?