well, that didn't go well
I was, repeat, was on Kubuntu 26.04 LTS. Not anymore. I'm back to 24.04 and am staying with it. For now.
It wasn't just the Wayland graphics platform breaking things that was the problem, especially since you can switch back to X11 (which I did do). Enough annoyances happened in 26.04 to where I said screw this, I'm going back to 24.04, and did.
The last I spoke of this, I talked about workarounds when using 24.04. Since I did a fresh install from scratch, I learned more this time around, meaning fewer workarounds were required.
I also gained back over 25GB of space on the new install because I had a Virtualbox image I forgot to remove on the previous one. Oops.
Speaking of which, While I was doing the 26.04 thing, I did briefly try Boxes, as you can convert a Virtualbox VDI to a Boxes QCOW2, which by the way is done using qemu-utils on Ubuntu/Debian:
qemu-img convert -p -f vdi -O qcow2 "/path/to/disk.vdi" "$HOME/disk.qcow2"
I used that for a Windows XP Virtualbox PC I have (mainly for legacy Garmin stuff), but it didn't work when I tried to load it in Boxes. Maybe I did something wrong. Not sure. Whatever. I just went back to Virtualbox. It was easier to perform an "appliance" export out of Virtualbox and just import to the new install.
So yeah, back on 24.04. For how long? Time will tell.
i have never financed a burrito
Some say an example of modern financial stupidity is that you can finance anything. All you have to do is go to Chipotle, use the Klarna app, do the BNPL (buy now, pay later) thing, make your purchase and ta-da, you've officially financed a burrito.
Is this any different from making the same purchase on a credit card?
No.
If one goes to Burger King and orders a Whopper Jr. w/cheese, then pays for it on plastic, that is absolutely a BNPL purchase. Until the card is paid off, that burger was literally financed.
Is it a bad decision to finance a burger? No. If over time the burger ended up costing 3x more due to payments with interest charges because the card wasn't paid off, the bad decision came from how the finances were handled and not from the burger itself.
Lately, I've been seeing a ton of videos on how so many people are in crushing amounts of debt. On the majority of these videos, one thing sticks out more than anything else.
Nearly everyone shown is under the age of 35.
Are people younger than 35 flat out stupid with money?
Yes.
Maybe not all under-35 people are mouth breathing knuckle dragging morons in how they handle their finances, but most are.
For example, Middle Aged Dude would buy a trunk organizer, because that's a genuinely useful thing for the car. An under-35 on the other hand would buy an illuminated gamer chair.
Another example is Middle Aged Dude would buy microfiber cleaning cloths, while an under-35 buys a t-shirt that says "sucks" on it.
And, of course, only an under-35 would be dumb enough to finance a burrito and go into real debt for it. Middle Aged Dude would just go to a gas station and buy a packet of peanuts instead, or say to hell with that and just cook food at home that's already paid for.
small square short tabs in firefox 157
The new Firefox 157 is actually really nice, with one exception. Rounded menus and rounded tabs everywhere, and it sucks.
But it can be fixed.
Getting rid of the roundy-everything:
1. about:config
2. Set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true.
3. Go to Firefox profile folder, go to folder chrome. If the folder does not exist, create it.
4. In chrome folder, create blank userChrome.css file.
5. Put the following in userChrome.css and save:
:root {
--border-radius-xsmall:0 !important;
--border-radius-small:0 !important;
--border-radius-medium:0 !important;
--border-radius-large:0 !important;
--border-radius-xlarge:0 !important;
--border-radius-circle:0 !important;
}
Making tabs smaller so they're not bloated and stupid:
1. about:config
2. Set browser.uidensity to 1.
Restart browser. All menu and tab edges are now square to get all the space back you lost from the roundy crap.
Why is square better than round here? Easy answer. Easier to click on things you want to click. That roundy garbage made it more difficult to click on everything. Both tab and menu edges were effectively chopped off. Going square puts things back the way they were, which made more sense.
Remember what I said about upgrading? This is an example of being able to fix things when they get jacked up from an update/upgrade.
there are reasons upgrading sucks
Kubuntu 26.04 LTS was released back in April, but I've resisted upgrading from 24.04 LTS for two reasons. The last upgrade went not-so smoothly, and I hate upgrading.
My experience upgrading from 24.04 LTS to 26.04 LTS was as follows:
The graphical installer spit back an error that it couldn't upgrade, but without giving me too much info as to why, so I did it the Terminal (Konsole) way...
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
(reboot)
sudo do-release-upgrade -m desktop
...which told me something called go-mtpfs was causing some issue. The installer said I had the option to ignore the error and continue, or stop and find the "correct" version/release or whatever. I stopped, ran into Synaptic Package Manager, uninstalled go-mtpfs since it's just for Android stuff, then ran the above commands again. No errors after that, and things continued normally.
Out of the entire upgrade process I only had to answer something like 3 or 4 yes/no questions. Just boot loading stuff for the most part, if I remember correctly.
After reboot, done. This was how it went for both computers.
Getting to the desktop was fine, but where things broke had to do with a switch from X11 to Wayland, so I had to switch back to X11, and that fixed almost everything.
I had to change window settings to turn off crap like floating taskbar, "wobbly windows" and a few other things. The fortunate part is that I got things back to looking and acting how I prefer.
Some things were fixed and improved. I now have sound events for connect/disconnect of USB devices (24.04 LTS never got that right), 7-Zip works better, GIMP now has a light mode to get rid of the default dark mode garbage, and LibreOffice while at a newer version still looks and acts the same, which is good.
The last time I upgraded from one LTS to the next, it went... meh. Some stuff outright broke where I had to use workarounds to fix things. For this upgrade, there were fewer workarounds. That's about the best I can say about it.
Why I hate upgrading
Back in the Windows 7 days, I purposely locked down the OS so absolutely nothing auto-upgraded. Windows updates were shut off. Main browser at the time was Firefox ESR, with extra configuration to block auto-updating (I only updated when it was absolutely necessary). For docs and spreadsheets, OpenOffice 4.1.7 with updates off. For other software I used, same deal. I brought whatever I was using up to the software version I knew did everything I wanted, then stopped updating.
I ran Win7 like that for years with no problems whatsoever. The only time I ever blew up 7 was when I did dumb stuff, such as trying to edit large videos the computer couldn't handle, or using a crappy USB stick or whatever.
The upgrade hate comes from knowing that a) turning all the updates off results in a very pleasant, easy and fast computing experience, and b) turning updates on can and will jack things up.
Unfortunately, no modern OS can be run 100% no-update style like Win7, and that's mainly due to the web browser. Chrome, Firefox, some forked thing, whatever, doesn't matter. The browser has to be updated or certain web sites will break on attempt to use them. And since the browser doesn't run as an island unto itself like it used to, the whole OS needs to be kept updated.
At least the Linux issues I dealt with could be fixed. The desktop environment crap I mentioned above is an example of that. After upgrading, some stuff got enabled I didn't want, so I turned it off. Or, if it were something that majorly frustrated me, I could junk KDE temporarily or entirely by switching to Xfce or any number of others.
It is when I'm not "allowed" to fix issues that I want to start throwing things. Win11 is, of course, notorious for this. For five years -- FIVE -- no small taskbar option. Only now does Win11 finally have it, along with being able to put the taskbar on top, bottom, left or right side of the screen. That will make some people jump for joy, but the point is that for FIVE years, it was a completely unfixable problem with stock 11. In Linux, the wait time to fix a problem is fewer than five minutes if you know what you're doing.
There may come a point in the future when I switch off KDE in favor of something more lightweight and custom code in all the features I want. That might be Xfce or something lighter like fluxbox. KDE Plasma is what I use, but I know the only way to really get a web browser's meat hooks out of the GUI and back to being an island unto itself is with a lightweight environment.
For now, 26.04 LTS works, such as it is.
just go buy another one, my dude
Fixing computers. Won't get you laid, won't get you paid.
Even though this is about something to do with an old Garmin nuvi, that totally qualifies as a computer because it's an electronic thing that calculates stuff.
Got a request to do something that I promptly ignored and decided to write this instead since that was a better use of my time.
The request was this:
I have an old nuvi. Take time out of your life to make a video to fix my nuvi problem, solely for my benefit even though you have no idea who I am since this is my first time communicating with you. Make absolutely certain to instruct very slowly, going through each step like leading along a little lost puppy dog, and be sure not to use any complicated words at all. And if I have any
questionsdemands after that (and I sure will!), answer all those too, also very slowly and carefully. Yeah, I already asked AI before asking you, but that didn't help. Make my video now for free, and quick! KTHXBYE.
It's almost always the way when someone makes a request like the above, it's for a screen that can be bought cheap on eBay right now.
In my mind, I'm thinking, "DUDE. If that nuvi screen you have doesn't work anymore and it's cheap to get a replacement, buy another one."
The screen that guy asked demanded me to make a video about could literally be replaced for under 30 bucks, shipped. I checked. Did he? Obviously not.
No, I will not fix your computer.