Linux on phones and tablets is a thing. Typing from my Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro running postmarketOS and LibreWolf.

How is the external display connected? I have never seen Freesync over HDMI work. The early implementations were AMD proprietary and the new ones require HDMI 2.1 which has some ridiculous bullshit about not being implemented by open source drivers. HDMI sucks, use DisplayPort if possible. If your laptop doesn’t have a DisplayPort connector, try a USB-C to DisplayPort cable, as usually the type C ports on laptops support DisplayPort alt mode.

I wish these implementations of secure boot were designed more to protect the SOFTWARE against “theft” than the HARDWARE against “tampering”. Let us wipe the secure boot keys, but in the process erase the firmware (or have the firmware encrypted so that erasing the keys renders it unbootable) and then allow new code to run. Blocking third party firmware on consumer devices is a shit move. It just creates more e-waste when the OEM stops updating it and the community can’t make their own replacement firmware.

Pretty much all ext4 except for a few Windows installs on NTFS.

True, but if you buy a finished product that uses the new chip that has secure boot enabled, you can’t flash your own firmware. From what I gather, the boot keys are burned into OTP memory so they can’t be erased or changed. The chip is permanently locked to that firmware.

Not really a fan of putting secure boot on. The only purpose that serves is locking the customers out of their purchased hardware. Raspberry Pi is clearly not targeting the maker market with those changes, they want that corporate money and are willing to stick the finger to hackers and makers in the process. Can’t make custom firmware if you can’t boot it.

RISC-V support is nice. I like the idea of being able to work as both an ARM and a RISC-V microcontroller while sharing the same array of peripherals.

Maybe this explains why my webcam indicator is on when no applications are using it. It’s been confusing me for a while now. I’ve double checked anything that I expect to access it is not, and it doesn’t seem to be locked because opening it works, but it sometimes boots up woth the light on. I am using Arch with pipewire so I’ll check and see if this is what’s going on.

I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don’t need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.

I’m not sure about FF specifically, but 99% of the time you’re connecting a microcontroller to a PC you’re doing so over a serial port (UART) of some sort. It may be a physical COM port or it may be a USB to serial adapter or even a purely virtual serial port over a USB connection, but the methodology is all the same. Unless you are running a serial terminal on that port (as in, a commandline on your PC served on the given /dev/ttyX interface, not a terminal emulator letting you read/write from the port), the microcontroller can’t just run scripts on the PC. Instead, you will want to write a script/program that opens the port and waits for a command to be sent from the microcontroller, then that listener script can execute whatever functionality you require. Note that only one application can have the port active at a time, so if your listener is a separate program from your event handler, you will have to close the port on the listener before running the handler, then reopen the port on the listener once the handler is done so it can start listening for the next event. Better to just make it all one program that is always running on the PC and does both listening for events and handling them so there’s only one program that needs access to the serial port.

Yes, coincidence.

I can’t disagree with you there.

Should have not trusted a third party to install proprietary code into the kernel. It’s not a Windows issue directly, they have a Linux version too, but anything that allows third parties to put proprietary code into your kernel and automatically update it without your approval is untrustworthy.

It’s not specific to Microsoft, but the general idea of letting proprietary software install whatever it wants whenever it wants directly into your kernel is a bad idea regardless. If the user had any control over this update process, organizations could do small scale testing themselves before unleashing the update on their entire userbase. If it were open source software, the code would be reviewed by many more eyes and tested independently by many more teams before release. The core issue is centralizing all trust on one organization, especially when that organization is a business and thus profit-driven above all else which could be an incentive to rush updates.

It’s also a “don’t allow third party proprietary shit into your kernel” issue. If the driver was open source it would actually go through a public code review and the issue would be more likely to get caught. Even if it did slip through people would publically have a fix by now with all the eyes on the code. It also wouldn’t get pushed to everyone simultaneously under the control of a single company, it would get tested and packaged by distributions before making it to end users.

NVK is already usable, performancr isn’t 100% of the proprietary driver but I play Overwatch on NVK at 165FPS on my RTX3070 laptop a lot, low settings but very playable. This is with an Optimus configuration (VRR Freesync panel on AMD iGPU) in GNOME Wayland.

Even if so, it would likely still have proprietary blobs, just embedded into a ROM or flash chip on the card. Personally, I’d rather have firmware loaded at runtime over hard-coded, at least then the blob is able to be reverse engineered possibly.

I just donate by whatever means the project offers. Sometimes it’s paypal, sometimes patreon, sometimes GitHub sponsorship, sometimes something else like OpenCollective. Read the readme or homepage of the project to see what options they take.

Honestly, Mozilla has been peddling adware for a long time now. The writing has been on the wall. It started with putting sponsored links to Amazon on the Firefox home screen, then the shitty Pocket acquisition and the stupid featured stories/recommendations garbage, then the full screen Mozilla VPN ads…Firefox has been adware for a while. Use a fork that removes the bullshit. Switch to LibreWolf.

I’m not familiar with KDE’s new feature yet, but if it only supports sysfs LEDs then it won’t control 99% of keyboards. Few RGB keyboards have drivers that expose this interface. Most RGB keyboards are controlled from userspace on their official software on Windows, and that’s also what most Linux projects that control RGB devices including my OpenRGB project do. I wonder if it would be possible to write an OpenRGB plugin/script that exposes a virtual /sys/class/leds/openrgb device that KDE could talk to, then translate that into OpenRGB calls to set the color on all available devices. It doesn’t sound too difficult.