👏 Fireworks! 🎆

Yes, gdebi :

• https://screenshots.debian.net/package/gdebi

Windows does have a fallback mode called safe mode and that’s exactly what’s being used to fix this utter mess.

The other fix was reboot your Windows computer at least 15 times.

• https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/07/crowdstrike-fixes-start-at-reboot-up-to-15-times-and-get-more-complex-from-there/

Package management isn’t going to save you from this as it didn’t save the Linux systems affected last time. It didn’t stop Arch Linux from failing to boot after a Grub update either.

Not everyone was affected though :

• https://web.archive.org/web/20240324083115/https://endeavouros.com/news/full-transparency-on-the-grub-issue/

How come not everyone was impacted?

Prior to the most recent version, grub only registered the fwsetup if detected support. If your machine detected support, you would have had the fwsetup command registered and the failure wouldn’t occur.

Big fan of Cantata here :)

It was forked this year and the new developer kept using the original name.

• https://github.com/nullobsi/cantata

• https://flathub.org/apps/dog.unix.cantata.Cantata

Would using a blue-tooth keyboard make sense ?

EDIT: I kinda forgot to actually mention my problem. When booting nornall, I get stuck at a lonely white blinking cursor on a black screen, so startx seems to make some problems. I enter a TTY and run startx and this is what I get when running startx:

output of startx

What was the output ? It is not visible for me here.

• Were you using startx successfully before ?
• Or are you reverting to trying startx and you did use some graphical display manager like gdm, sddm or lightdm before ?
• Could it be a disk space problem ? If you run out of space trouble can happen with various applications.
• Can you boot from a previous kernel (At the GRUB or systemd boot menu) and see what happens ?

Huge news 🎉 Thanks OP for sharing.

It feels like a relief after reading earlier Lemmy comments in other posts about btrfs vs ext4 and having read this Wikipedia page paragraph :

In 2008, the principal developer of the ext3 and ext4 file systems, Theodore Ts’o, stated that although ext4 has improved features, it is not a major advance, it uses old technology, and is a stop-gap. Ts’o believes that Btrfs is the better direction because “it offers improvements in scalability, reliability, and ease of management”.[29] Btrfs also has “a number of the same design ideas that reiser3/4 had”.[30] 😢

Oh no, wait a minute, I overlooked the next sentence last time 😀 :

However, ext4 has continued to gain new features such as file encryption and metadata checksums.

Is this a desktop computer ? Two hard disks can make things more difficult. How about taking the power cord temporarily off from the larger disk, then install, and if it’s successful then turn it off and give the 2nd disk power again, and add that 2nd disk manually to the fstab as e.g. /opt/ as mount point.

Nice

I picked the lesser evil

The choice for iOS can be a convenient choice for daily use if one is ready to deal with the restrictions (Like every other web browser is a Safari browser layer instead of a real browser and the fact that Apple is not into allowing ad-blocking easily). With Android phones the freedom for the end user is, compared to iOS, massive. And having a de-Googled Android phone with a custom ROM is no longer rocket-science or for the faint of heart these days because you can buy custom ROM Android phones pre-installed so you’re good to go.

• 28 juli 2014 — What do you think about Linus Torvalds? I met Linus and his wife briefly at a party in 1999, and haven’t crossed paths since.

• Video with Linus giving RMS the Torvalds award in 1999 : https://youtube.com/watch?v=xnb_eFSnXFI

openshot
kdenlive
shotcut
flowblade
pitivin

• https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinelerra -> https://www.cinelerra-gg.org/

Wondering : Does duf do a better job than df with btrfs ?

• https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=duf
• https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/

Yes, go ahead and file the bug. And as others mentioned already, the custom screensaver modifications of XScreensaver like for LM may have bugs. The author of XScreensaver has been complaining about this several times.

• https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/faq.html#gnome-screensaver

The bug you found looks similar to this one :

• https://linuxreviews.org/Xfce4-screensaver_0.1.9_Is_Released_With_A_Critical_Security_Fix

Unlocking a machine locked with Xfce’s screensaver xfce4-screensaver has long been a simple matter of turning two monitors on at the exact same time. That makes Xfce4-screensaver versions prior to 0.1.9 segfault and crash - leaving the machine unlocked. This very unfortunate Xfce bug #16102 has been open since October 29th 2019 and we have pointed fingers at it several times before. Xfce developer Sean Davis has finally closed this gaping security hole. He explained that the embarrassingly long delay before this security vulnerability was addressed was due to “real life conflicts” in a brief comment on March 22nd. He did not elaborate and we did not ask for further details since it is likely none of our business.

I think I’ve read somewhere that xrandr only works with Xorg and not with Wayland.

Simply install debian 12.5 again, the easiest choice.

Good choice.

Install linux mint, so I get ubuntu but without them throwing their subscription services down my throat. I’m unsure about other advantages, as ubuntu is debian based, maybe the more frequent program updates? Kernels are also updated more often than with debian as far as I know. Do you know of other advantages?

There’s LMDE, Linux Mint Debian version.

Go for FreeBSD: this might require a learning curve, because this is an OS I’ve never used. Are commands that different from debian?

Yes, commands are different (For example ifconfig and not ip. And watch on Linux is something different on FreeBSD) and you can expect several things to not work out of the box. Also, mounting removable devices is different. Documentation is very good though unless your reached a niche problem. I’d suggest to first toy around with FreeBSD in a VM (Qemu or VirtualBox) if you want to sneak preview it and learn more.

I guess KDE means using SDDM. Would this help ? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SDDM#Login_session_appears_on_an_unexpected_display

With some phones you need to go through extra steps to be able to do OEM unlocking. Looks like it is the case here, see the steps in the FAQ linked here : https://en.miui.com/unlock/download_en.html

This appears to have solved the same problem for others :

• https://rileymacdonald.ca/2018/04/02/ubuntu-resolved-e-package-cache-file-corrupted/

• sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

• sudo apt update

While toolbox and distrobox seem very similar, distrobox comes with a slight warning :

• https://distrobox.it/#security-implications
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Distrobox#Security_implications