trompete [he/him]

How did you manage that Pacman ghost prompt?

No… Not in practice anyway, maybe in theory. I know on ARM SoCs there’s lack of auto-configuration (like you have on PCs with e.g. PCI), and the kernel has no way of knowing what hardware is available. So there’s a file that lists all the devices, and how to talk to them, called (I think) a “device tree”. This file gets appended to the kernel image, and so the bootloader just loads that together with the kernel. The kernel doesn’t do any auto-configuration and rather just reads this file and loads the relevant drivers based on that. I guess it might be (in theory) possible to do this on PC, but I’ve never heard of such a thing. I also don’t expect that to make any noticeable difference for boot times. Pretty sure boot times are dominated by user space, and not the kernel anyway.

Sidenote (don’t do this): You can compile your own kernel (this used to be pretty common back in the day). You can select only the drivers you need, and can also select whether they should be compiled directly into the kernel or as modules that can be loaded later if needed. Pretty sure the auto-detection happens regardless for most hardware, since the driver needs to be initialized and told where the hardware is to be found. Compiling a driver right into the kernel just means the driver code is in memory right from the very start. I don’t recommend doing this btw, the only difference you will notice is shit not working due to you screwing up, and you’re going to waste a bunch of time and electricity compiling your kernel with every update. You sometimes needed to do this to get all your hardware working, but I haven’t done this in ages.

Should just work. No need to reinstall. You are correct in thinking that all the drivers are included, and furthermore, the drivers on Linux are typically loaded automatically when the hardware is detected on every boot, and this is not configured anywhere in a file or anything like that.

Usually, anyway. In theory it’s possible that you manually (or some tool) hardcoded drivers somewhere, like in xorg.conf, but I’m willing to bet that isn’t the case.

Debian’s popcon has by-category lists, so e.g. here are the most popular packages from the category “shells”, sorted by most installed:

https://popcon.debian.org/main/shells/by_inst

What file structure? I just put everything in /home and then try to vaguely remember part of the filename and glob *part-of-filename*.

Ok, actually, every couple of years, I move all my files into a new directory, /home/old. I think I’m up to /home/old/old/old/old/old right now. I recommend using find to look for files in there.

Oh god I actually watched half of this. He says the left (apparently Jeffrey Sachs is left now?) just bought Putin’s argument about security concerns, but (big reveal about halfway in, choir music swells), Putin is actually driven by mystical thinking and megalomania.

So Putin is lying when he talks about realpolitik or says anything that makes any sense. But when he speaks of history or the motherland or whatever, then he’s telling the truth. He’s definitely not just doing a bit of story telling to hit on those emotions. No Sir! That’s a window right into his soul. And apparently his personal feelings are enough to move whole armies.

Maybe, just maybe, there are actual material reasons for why stuff happens, and it’s not just ideas in the minds of individual “great men”.

I’m mocking you. You’re the one that drew a line from Germanic tribes and their heroic culture to modern-day Ukraine. These are some pretty völkische theories you got there.

Well that’s better! Someone so interested in tales of Germanic valor should be ready for another Volkssturm. What I don’t get is why you wouldn’t sacrifice yourself in Ukraine, what with the blood relation and all. Maybe Ukrainians aren’t quite as Germanic in your mind after all?

How is this an excuse? The Germanic tribes of Ukraine used to fight down to the last elderly person I hear.

Is the OEM kernel getting security updates? Then it should be fine.

If you want a specific feature that’s available in the newer kernel, then just try it out. You can select the kernel during boot. If it all works, uninstall the OEM kernel and it should default to the generic one.

Edit: If you want to find out whether you’re getting security updates, I’d check the changelog. It should be somewhere like /usr/share/doc/linux-image-somethingsomething/changelog.gz. The entries there should have a date. If the last security fix is older than a couple of weeks, that would be concerning.

Help help, I’m being repressed.

I think the search only works once the communities are cached on your instance or something.

Don’t kid yourself, the AfD fuckers have supporters in the police and courts, and they’re getting money from some parts of the capitalist class. They won’t be shut down and they will come into power. And they’ll do social murder. But then again, the libs are already doing social murder, just look at the asylum seekers. But that shit will get worse until people start actually pushing back on this shit, instead of just appeasing the far-right like the current government is doing.

Fuck him, and fuck the media for platforming him, and fuck every single political party for moving to the right.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual