all the fascist bullshit aside, this is a project from a dude that was a decades long apple fanboy and discovered linux like yesterday has zero clue on how to do things well because he’s a Maverick Trailblazer and what do the little people know this is the way and whatnot so I guess yeah we is back at the fascist thing and yeah stay away.

can’t recommend it enough, saner defaults, way smoother, mucho easier to work with than postmarketOS. wish I hadn’t bricked my 6T, apparently can’t resurrect it now without windows which I ain’t got…

that clown? pass.

I do a custom install with systemd-boot where i have one 2 GB EFI partition that’s mounted at /boot; used to be at /efi but it bothered me I can’t tab-complete /etc. I’ve been wanting to give UKI a go but can’t get around to it.

very cool.

was looking for something similar, to repurpose a Macbook Pro 17 from 2006; 32-bit EFI and Radeon X1600, plently of issues running a semi-modern distro, but maybe as an X11 terminal for my headless server… but I just start thinking about it and give up, needs way too much stuff done.

here’s why you’re doing beginners a disservice with Mint.

it’s an X11 distro. no big deal if you’re installing it on a 10-year old optiplex with a 1080p monitor, works same as wayland on that setup.

if it’s a laptop, you get shitty scaling and hidpi support. worse touchpad gestures. dock/undock issues with multiple displays, not to mention - more scaling issues. even if there is some feature parity with a modern Gnome/Plasma desktop, the predominant development effort isn’t in Cinnamon’s camp.

if it’s a modern desktop you also face issues with spotty support as Mint lags with kernel versions. finally if you got both, muscle memory is a problem if you got Cinnamon/X on desktop and Gnome/Wayland on laptop.

if you’re an experienced user, yes, I am sure you can make it work. for a beginner, we need an onboarding path with the least possible issues and when there are any, ample documentation on how to fix it.

there’s basically two types of dudes (gender not inferred): the ones that faced with a problem go “hmm, that’s interesting. let’s try…” regardless if it’s a lazy afternoon or they’re under heavy artillery fire… and then there are those that invariably go “oh what the fuck now!?”

if you’re in the latter camp, you have one option and that’s Ubuntu. for an experienced user it does suck in some ways, but it “just works” in so many others. you will have ample challenges making the transition and you don’t need additional ones.

when you’ve been around the block a few times, survived a crash or two, know what’s what and have at least a passable understanding of the OS, then you can travel farther and explore options, as your switching costs to something like Fedora WS are essentially zero and 99% of what you learned applies.

but, right now, you can stop looking - this is your only option.

the first time I installed arch on my T420s, I was blown away! a minimalistic install, done in no time. no cruft of any kind, latest software versions, and the speed - the thing booted more than twice as fast as Fedora! I was ecstatic, how come everybody’s not using this!?

but then I needed a piece of software that wasn’t available and flatpak wouldn’t work in that scenario. rpm and deb available but nothing for arch. OK, so there’s this AUR thingy - cool, so like a repo, right? one copy/paste and I’m done…

not fucking so. what this does is fetch the source code and then compiles and builds it on your puny dual-core…I can’t imagine what a full system upgrade looks like, compiling tons of stuff for hours. that’s 1998 linux, I thought we were done with this.

not a week later, a normal system update with no errors made the thing unbootable. yeah, said one laconic reply, you really should keep up with breaking changes by way of the mailing list. do what now? the what now? dude, this just became a job.

so that was it for me. thanks to btrfs subvolumes, all my stuff was already there and ready to go for the new OS.

to each his own, but I can’t stand this clown. he desperately wants to come off as this wise, cranky, tell-it-like-it-is one-of-the-guys, but the often cretinous takes permeating his works are off-putting. the evil elites in charge of opensource not thinking about people with mech drives in 2024, the abject “horror” that’s systemd, his “helpful” notes on bugs in five year old software, for my money the dude can get bent.

so when he likes something it immediately prompts me to do the inverse; not that it’s needed in the case of MX.

good start, but in the next iteration (as you’re the dabbler) try to replace tailscale with wireguard. the majority of that stack is not needed for your scenario, and you’ll also not dick around with authentication and such.

eons ago I heard and internalised an awesome phrase: “don’t analyze the problem - solve it”.

in that vein, install it yourself and ship the laptop to him. don’t matter what it cost, it’s not like it’s gonna bankrupt you and it’s not like you’re gonna do this multiple times per year.

you’re 100% in control of everything and that’s the next best thing to being there and doing it for yourself. you’re gonna figure out how to remotely do half of the things you mention across CGNATs and whatnot? I am sure you got better things to do; I know dad has.

try the archive https://web.archive.org/web/20250613134705/https://thelibre.news/actually-what-is-a-freedesktop-portal/

whoever configured thelibre web server should be replaced, at the very least. loads as if it’s on the dark side of the moon.

edit: cool article though

so, like torify up until now? tried it on a couple of apps as a replacement, works fine. the rust build chain though, madonn’…