Actually, you don’t even need Redmond in the equation, just normal media shenanigans. Doomsday warnings sell more newspapers ad impressions than “Minor security issue here, patch when available.”

I’ve encountered a couple of people who use them as remote cameras to observe their 3D printers. That suggests a bunch of other possibilities for things you want to be able to watch or listen to without standing over them and without buying an extra webcam to cover what might be a temporary need.

Hmm? Unless you’re trying to run the most recent build of Gnome, the set of software that actually requires systemd is pretty small. There’s a list somewhere on the Gentoo wiki. What exactly are you having problems with?

In Firefox, I don’t remember having something similar. That was like 5+ years ago, I believe profiles were there, but perhaps less easy to use.

The profiles feature in Firefox haa been there for a long, long time—more than a decade, and possibly longer than Chrome has existed—but not many people read the documentation to find the command-line switch to evoke the selector, and they’ve never been terribly easy to find from inside the GUI.

Well, it often feels like every “Linux security issue” flagged in the tech press is a privilege escalation, but I admit that I haven’t sat down and done the math.

Exactly. It’s Yet Another Privilege Escalation Vulnerability. Unless you’re dealing with a multiuser machine, the attacker first needs to use some other vuln to get into an unprivileged account. Without that additional vulnerability, this exploit is useless.

We don’t talk about 1997. It might hear. 😱

As a long-time Gentoo user, I can tell you that it’s perfectlly capable of producing both a useful gaming rig and a useful server, provided you have some idea of what you want to end up with.

Proprietary nvidia drivers should be straightforward enough: emerge nvidia-drivers and blacklist the nouveau module (or compile a custom kernel that doesn’t contain it). You’ll probably want to read what the Gentoo wiki has to say about Steam.

Good luck.

If using OpenRC is all it tales to be on the dark side, then I’ve been there since before it was cool.

It has better specs than the 2008 laptop I retired last year (I was running Gentoo on that, but I don’t entirely recommend that unless you’re experienced with Gentoo and know what kind of setup to go with). Anyway, SNES emulation is less demanding than running a modern web browser, so your little beastie should be fine for that.

Eudev wasn’t spun up and then maintained for several years for no reason (it spun down again as the pressure dropped off). And you still can’t get the udev source from upstream as a separate tarball—you have to download the entire systemd tarball, even if you don’t want any of the rest of the contents.

Gentoo, across multiple machines. Started there, stayed there. Yes, it’s a bear to install, but once you’ve got everything sorted out, it’s rock-solid.

Heh. I’m old and my reflexes are dropping off. Plus, as a Gentoo user, I tend to reach for the command-line tools first.

That sounds like bad data got written to some config files, because a reboot should have corrected a simple bad handoff and restored the preconfigured state. Might have been interesting to see what xrandr had to say about those monitors at the time, and whether it could have fixed them.

Anyway, sounds like your side monitors got disabled, and rather than re-enabling them when you exited WINE, something in the stack decided they’d always been that way . . . but because they were still powered and connected, the monitors still said “hi” every few minutes, and then got identified and swatted down again. I doubt I would have had the hand-speed to re-enable them through the GUI the way you did.

Careful there, WINE Is Not an Emulator (yes, really, that’s what it stands for—back in the 90s, we thought that recursive acronyms were cool. See also GNU).

What you saw could indeed have been a bad handoff, assuming it didn’t persist through a reboot. If it did, then it sounds more like a KDE (or Wayland?) bug.

And I think all programs should follow user theming, regardless of desktop environment, widget set, or anything else. ('Scuse me while I give GTK4 the stinkeye again.) You can never tell whether someone’s colour selection is a matter of accessibility rather than just personal preference, so you absolutely should not ignore it. Defaults matter very little as long as you can change them.

It’s really more nvidia’s fault than Mint’s—the nvidia proprietary drivers periodically drop support for a generation or three of cards, and nouveau doesn’t work properly with some cards because nvidia has a history of not giving out needed information.

Why would it be awkward? Most non-technical people are so thrown by my white-text-on-black desktop theme that they can’t even tell what software I’m using, and the few technical people around know that I have Opinions about software and aren’t interested in talking about it. Keeping everything adequately compatible with the company-issued software is my problem.

How would I blacklist the nouveau driver?

Create a file in /etc/modprobe.d/ containing the text blacklist nouveau (worked for me on Gentoo and for a friend on Ubuntu) or add a kernel parameter module_blacklist=nouveau to your bootloader. However, if you don’t have the correct proprietary driver, that won’t help.

After 20 years of Gentoo, I don’t see myself switching in the next five. Comfortable, capable, flexible.