data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • Honestly, I’ve been tempted by a Kobo lately; I have a lot of Star Trek RPG and comic book PDFs/ePUBs that I got through Humble Bundle over the past couple years.

    Kobo seems like the least horrible brand I can get for a reasonable price with a reasonable screen quality; as pleasantly simple and reliable as they seem, and as nice as electronics re-use is, I’m not sure that one Sony e-reader that’s as old as my younger sibling fulfills my use case.

    Though honestly, if you have other recommendations for a Linux-friendly color e-reader, I’d be glad to hear them.




  • What GPU model is it? And what distro are you using?

    Did you install separate AMD drivers? You’re generally not supposed to do that; it’s just plug-and-play in the kernel and MESA (assuming the version is new enough), and you usually don’t need to download separate drivers.

    Also, what kernel flags did you have to use?

    It’s just that I’m a bit skeptical any of this is actually the fault of the AMD Linux kernel driver, and I would guess there’s some underlying software or hardware issue like a faulty ACPI implementation on the motherboard. I’m not saying AMD can do no wrong, but in this case, making blanket statements about the quality of AMD GPU drivers may be premature.


  • As others have said, “stable” and “unstable” have a different connotation in the FOSS world.

    Rolling releases probably don’t have more software crashes than their stable counterparts, which is what you meant.

    However, some use cases prefer that they are able to use the same config for a long time, and when software updates frequently, system administration can become a cat-and-mouse game of “What config broke this time?” That’s not to say rolling release is bad, but sometimes it’s like using a power drill instead of a screw driver.

    Also, I definitely feel like a stable distro is more likely to survive a software update after not using the computer for a few months to a year. Granted, I’ve had a Debian Testing (rolling release) install that did survive an upgrade after a year of non-use, but I’ve also seen Arch VMs that broke after just a couple months of non-use, forcing me to reinstall.




  • I used Linux in a VM and WSL for several years, and I occasionally used it on an old laptop. It was in 2022 on the week I installed Cygwin that I thought, “I do more Linux stuff than Windows stuff. Why don’t I just straight up use Linux?”

    I created a test install on a secondary drive, which has now been my main install for years and has been moved to a bigger drive twice.

    I got very used to Linux, and Windows gave me no reason to come back.








  • Alright then. That probably eliminates the lp thing. Can I ask: what journalctl command (or logging command in general, if not journalctl) did you use? I’d recommend giving the results of journalctl -b -1 -p 3 and dmesg.

    Also, it’d probably be a good idea to tell us what ports are getting blocked; that shouldn’t be personally identifying in any way. After doing research on what those ports are and what ProtonVPN requires, try experimenting with unblocking some of them if you can; a blocked port shouldn’t crash your system, but it’s worth a shot.

    I might also recommend looking at a task manager, just to make sure some application isn’t taking up all your memory and causing the system to freeze.

    Finally, take a look at your CPU temps in case this is some kind of cooling failure.


  • I don’t think it’s ProtonVPN, at least not directly, as those happened over 20 minutes before the crash (I’m assuming it happened somewhere around 9:32:30)

    That last one looks really odd, and I’m wondering what that kernel module is used for. I’m looking around real quick.

    EDIT: Looks like it’s for line printers. I’m trying to think why your kernel would randomly load that. Can we see the contents of the following?:

    • /etc/modules-load.d/modules.conf
    • /usr/lib/modules-load.d/modules.conf
    • /usr/local/lib/modules-load.d/modules.conf (if it exists)
    • /run/modules-load.d/modules.conf (if it exists)

    Also, can you give us more information about your hardware, just to be sure?