Could be. Unfortunately, the folks who found this don’t really go into enough detail about the attack’s initial entry point.

Too late, in my case. Already got Bazzite running full time on a laptop! rpm-ostree and package layering are definitely a different way to think about things, but it’s nice having a system that’s kind of unbreakable.

I agree, though, that jumping into immutable distros shouldn’t be a glib decision for newcomers, though Aurora might be a good option for anyone that just wants to set it and forget it.

There have been major strides to make first time setups stupid-proof in a lot of distros, to the point that I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a demographic shift.

And like in your dad’s case, sometimes browsing the internet, getting on Zoom, and printing some files are all people really want.

PopOS is one I’m going to be looking at today, along with Aurora!

I mentioned to someone else that I practiced installing Arch in a VM, and while I got everything working, it wasn’t what I would consider a fun experience (and I’m not implying that nobody would find it fun). Just a level of system admin I’m not that interested in taking up. 😅

But that’s good advice to just take the plunge. Most of my important info is already backed up, so making sure my WFH software stack is ready is probably the final significant hurdle.

There is no “border crisis.” Operation Lone Star is 100% political theater designed to make gullible Texans think their tax dollars are being used responsibly, with the end goal of winning political points for the November election.

I guarantee that after November, we won’t hear a squeak about the border until it’s time to distract from some other effort by the GOP to fuck the environment, privatize everything, and/or strip non-white, non-male, non-Christian people’s rights away.

Best info I could find is from a previous blog post two links beyond the original article. “This updated version of malware delivered via JavaScript comes in archive files as attachments in emails.”

So, don’t open any weird attachments…? That’s what I’m getting from it.

TBH, it would be really funny and poetic to coopt the phrase “drill baby, drill” to mean something completely different. I hope the Internet makes that happen.

Good. End-stage-capitalism isn’t working for most people, and it’s time these polluters pay what they owe humanity.

If that means they’re sued into bankruptcy, well, then they should have better estimated the “cost of doing business,” hadn’t they have?

Ah, backups. That’s on my list of things to check. It would be terribly inconvenient to have to manually pull up a web interface just to do backups.

I like the way you think.

I’ll have to give Ventoy another try, since they just had some updates. I had originally tried booting it on a spare laptop (multiple times), but it would never boot, as if the MBR was broken.

That particular Edimax dongle I mentioned was sold as an 802.11ac option for Raspberry Pi’s. I didn’t know at the time that it was a unique case, so even the best of intentions can still sometimes wind up biting you. I would have bought something else, had I known!

At least you can find the package module in most community repositories, now.

Weird. I would be interested to know what actually happened, but I am not smart enough to troubleshoot hardware to that degree! At least you found something that works.

TBH, Red Hat focusing their attention on business isn’t that problematic for me. RHEL is specifically for businesses, and Red Hat needs to make money to keep operating. Kind of a necessary evil, if you could consider that evil. However, I completely understand why the capitalist realm makes average people squirm.

But that said, I usually prefer community projects myself (Fedora spins included), since they tend to have modified setups that are more in line with what regular users would want or need.

• Great advice. I had specific apps I have or was planning to research, but it would probably behoove me to double check everything.
• A live USB is advice I hadn’t considered. I’ve done that several times, and I’ve done a handful of VMs, but I never considered it might help sus out some potential hardware issues.
• I’ve actually practiced setting up Arch in a VM, and while I got everything to work just fine, I think pure Arch is just not for me. Something Arch-based would be okay, like BlendOS, but I don’t get that nice feeling of accomplishment in pure Arch from tinkering with every little system config file and dependency—just annoyance and exasperation.

Thank you for the history lesson! I can see why their decision might chafe some people or cause them to be a bit more wary (given that many of us live in an end-stage-capitalism hellscape), but as is often the case, real life details are usually mundane.

I’ve personally been impressed by their Atomic distros, and they’ve come a long way since I first tried vanilla Fedora with Gnome many years ago.

Windows VM is what I plan to do. I’m already running Bazzite full time on a spare laptop acting as an HTPC, and I’ve dabbled for the last several years and feel comfortable in the command line, so I don’t really see a need to waste an entire drive or partition just for Windows.

That’s good advice, though, to learn how to fix the bootloader. That’s something I don’t currently know how to do, so I’ll get on that! Thanks!

I have two drives, but I don’t really want to be part of the AI/Recall machine anymore. I’ll install Windows in a VM for the rare times I absolutely need it and forget about it the rest of the time.

I always forget about Aurora and Bluefin. Thanks for the reminder!

Why does Leap Micro have such a better logo than the parent project?