I don’t like Ubuntu, but objectively, this is probably a hardware issue and not a software issue.

I mean, you can try another distro to be sure, but the chances of it solving the issue are slim.

Wait… It’s a used stick? For future reference, that’s a key piece of information. I’m guessing it had a life before it was a server, making it older than 3 years. Depending on the history of the old laptop, I’d guess there’s a solid chance that stick is just worn out.

I’d disagree on the 16GB part. It’s nice to have, but I think 8GB is perfectly fine for most non-gaming use cases. Heck, a couple years ago, I used a laptop from 2010 with 4GB quite comfortably.

I mean, get at least 16GB if you can, especially in a dev setup, but 8 GB hasn’t murdered that many people yet.

I mean, that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that’s why Debian’s doing it.

If they were solving just that, then they would have just pushed for something like a reproducible tarball where you can point to a commit, branch, tag, etcetera from which that tarball can be reproduced and not bother migrating their package format.

Debian has a serious ease-of-packaging issue that I’ve witnessed first-hand, and I think they’ve made it clear that it’s moreso the ease factor they’re focused on that the security factor.

Not really. If xz were the issue, Debian would have just switched to a different tarball format like lz4.

This is more about Debian packaging conventions being very archaic and requiring a lot of futzing with upstream tarballs and patches.

I have an E16 gen 1 AMD that I run in a similar configuration- 8 GB soldered + 16 GB SODIMM. I’ve had no problems.

I’d recommend what others have suggested - try reseating the RAM and run a memory test. Also, what distro are you using, not that it’ll necessarily help.

Most software on that front works. I usually just use Cura for slicing.

Weird. Guess it’s a crazy fluke.

Honestly, AV1 software decode isn’t that bad on most recent hardware. My desktop with 2018 hardware does it just fine, and so does my 2023 laptop.

Try e-mailing them. I don’t know about that specific mirror, but I use the University of Arizona mirror, and when issues came up, they got back to me pretty quick about what was going on.

That sounds more like something weird about the card itself than with the driver; “power saving feature” makes me think a faulty hardware ACPI implementation by the card vendor is to blame. I’ve had a similar thing happen with my Wi-Fi modem where it would completely crash and only a reboot would fix it; I too have to do special kernel options to get it working.

Honestly, I’ve been tempted by a Kobo lately; I have a lot of Star Trek RPG and comic book PDFs/ePUBs that I got through Humble Bundle over the past couple years.

Kobo seems like the least horrible brand I can get for a reasonable price with a reasonable screen quality; as pleasantly simple and reliable as they seem, and as nice as electronics re-use is, I’m not sure that one Sony e-reader that’s as old as my younger sibling fulfills my use case.

Though honestly, if you have other recommendations for a Linux-friendly color e-reader, I’d be glad to hear them.

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this.

I’m very squeamish about adding more than the bare minimum external repos, though less so about extrepo stuff. I’m honestly worried this is just going to make it very easy for people to find new ways to break their systems; then again, that may be less likely to happen for the user demographic of Debian, and in the end, that’s no reason not to add a feature this convenient.

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianNet

It’s an official Debian address, and the main page redirects to .org. I think it has more broad use now, but I think it’s often been used for stuff like media codecs they can’t include in the main distro. Often used for side projects.

What GPU model is it? And what distro are you using?

Did you install separate AMD drivers? You’re generally not supposed to do that; it’s just plug-and-play in the kernel and MESA (assuming the version is new enough), and you usually don’t need to download separate drivers.

Also, what kernel flags did you have to use?

It’s just that I’m a bit skeptical any of this is actually the fault of the AMD Linux kernel driver, and I would guess there’s some underlying software or hardware issue like a faulty ACPI implementation on the motherboard. I’m not saying AMD can do no wrong, but in this case, making blanket statements about the quality of AMD GPU drivers may be premature.

As others have said, “stable” and “unstable” have a different connotation in the FOSS world.

Rolling releases probably don’t have more software crashes than their stable counterparts, which is what you meant.

However, some use cases prefer that they are able to use the same config for a long time, and when software updates frequently, system administration can become a cat-and-mouse game of “What config broke this time?” That’s not to say rolling release is bad, but sometimes it’s like using a power drill instead of a screw driver.

Also, I definitely feel like a stable distro is more likely to survive a software update after not using the computer for a few months to a year. Granted, I’ve had a Debian Testing (rolling release) install that did survive an upgrade after a year of non-use, but I’ve also seen Arch VMs that broke after just a couple months of non-use, forcing me to reinstall.

I went into this Phoronix article half-expecting someone to come up with a venomous, nasty comment over even something this mundane.

USB Wi-Fi adapters are usually fine. I do have a PCI-E Wi-Fi card in my desktop from my Hackintosh days, though, which has gone unused since my home now has lots of ethernet connections.

I used Linux in a VM and WSL for several years, and I occasionally used it on an old laptop. It was in 2022 on the week I installed Cygwin that I thought, “I do more Linux stuff than Windows stuff. Why don’t I just straight up use Linux?”

I created a test install on a secondary drive, which has now been my main install for years and has been moved to a bigger drive twice.

I got very used to Linux, and Windows gave me no reason to come back.

for file in *.WAV; do ffmpeg -i “$file” -i cover.png -disposition:v attached_art “$(basename “$file” .wav).flac”

(I’m doing this from memory, so I may have messed something up, but that’s the gist of it for taking a bunch of WAV files and turning them into FLACs with cover art. I also do a similar setup for combining the metadata of an MP3 and audio data of a WAV, since They Might Be Giants seems to have forgotten FLAC was invented.)