What I’m currently missing is a simple app for keeping contacts synced between my android phone and Linux desktop.

Excited to see what you do!

Star Labs Starbook 7, Coreboot.

It looks like you’re right - just checked and it only seems to happen when Power Saver is selected in GNOME. Do you know if anything can be done to prevent dimming in this mode?

This is what can happen if you don’t get anyone to look after your house when you’re away.

This just makes me angry

Well put.

I get screamed at for attention sometimes, which seems like a pretty good definition of trolling. So yeah.

Firstly - buy laptops that are more linux compatible

This is the thing: The laptop is from Starlabs, supposedly made for Linux…

In what way? I haven’t upgraded between major releases on Debian before.

Intel Arc integrated graphics.

Are you using the liquorix kernel?

I can only see one downvote and four upvotes from here - I think you’re good!

I had problems with waking from sleep/hibernate, audio issues (total dropouts as well as distortion in screen-recording apps), choppy video playback and refusal to enter fullscreen, wonky cursor scaling, apps not working as expected or not running at all. I’ve managed to fix most of these or find temporary workarounds (grateful for flatpaks for once!) or alternative applications. But the experience was not fun, particularly as there was only a 2 week return window for the laptop and I needed to be sure the problems weren’t hardware design/choice related. And I’m finding it 50/50 whether an app actually works when I install it from the repo. There’s a lot less documentation for manually installing things as well and DNF is slow compared to apt…

I don’t want to say for certain that Fedora as a distro is to blame but I suspect that it is. I miss my Debian days.

What makes Debian 12 a painful distro to upgrade?

Another option for some Kobos is Inkbox/QuillOS. It’s a full open source OS replacement and is very cool. It was very usable last summer when I tried it out on my Kobo Clara HD and is probably even better now.

I picked and ate a leaf of what I thought was wild garlic but it wasn’t. It felt like a bomb had gone off in my mouth. I sprinted home and washed my mouth out with everything I had, including wine and 51 pastis but nothing helped.

No permanent damage afaict.

Any Scottish person who has gone travelling has learnt this lesson the hard way.

This is a good one.

No, I think it’s a good assessment.

I swing between A and B and find B to be most healthy and reasonable, because I have no political power as well as for my own wellbeing.

Ive tried RSS for world news but find it even more overwhelming than browsing news sites because it’s displayed more compactly and looks like an avalanche of dystopian madness if I dont open the feed for a day or two.

What I really want is a weekly or maybe bi-weekly roundup of the five or ten most important global events. If anyone knows of a feed like that please let me know!

My advice is to spend more time out of the house! The more I stew in the epicentre of the entropy and problems the more overwhelmed I feel by them and the harder it is to tackle them. Getting out can help to get some perspective and make you appreciate what you do have.

Nice, I will have a look 👍