Episode 461 Show Notes

Welcome to mintCast

the Podcast by the Linux Mint Community for All Users of Linux

This is Episode 461!

Recorded on Saturday, May 17, 2025.

You know you want me, I’m Moss; On “staycation”, I’m Bill; and finally fixed my WiFi, I’m Eric

— Play Standard Intro —

  • First up in the news: Mint Monthly News, BackBlaze backups may be in trouble, you can run Arch inside Windows, Linux kernel drops 486 and early 586 support, and a new RaspberryPiOS release, and the end of Windows 10 support brings new opportunities;
  • In security and privacy: openSUSE removes Deepin Desktop over security issues, Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law
  • Then in our Wanderings: Bill goes mobile, Moss plays with a Pangolin, Eric finally fixes his WiFi.
  • In our Innards section: we talk about Virtual Machines;
  • In Bodhi Corner, just a bit about theming;
  • And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions.
  • Please remember if you want to follow along with our discussions, the full show notes for this episode are linked in the show’s description at mintcast.org/show-notes

— Play News Transition Bumper —

The News

20 minutes

  • Mint Monthly News
    • Codenames
    • The codenames for the next releases of Linux Mint and LMDE were chosen:
      • Linux Mint 22.2 will be called “Zara”
      • LMDE 7 will be called “Gigi”
    • A hint of Blue in Mint-Y
    • We’re adding a little bit of blue in our theme.
    • This is common practice in UI design. It’s done on mobile, desktop and all over the web. Grey is rarely completely grey, it usually has a little bit more blue in it than red and green.
    • Take your color picker and check the grey on GitHub. It’s not #f8f8f8, it’s #f6f8fa. Firefox does that well, Google docs, Trello etc..
    • The reason this is done is to make grey slightly more metallic looking and appear more modern. Pure grey is neutral, it can be perceived as cold or warm based on its surroundings. By bumping the blue (or in the case of github both the green and the blue) we force it to look cold.
    • Here’s an interesting discussion on the topic.
    • Another reason this makes the UI look more modern is because this is done a lot nowadays but it wasn’t done so much 10 years ago. Like with all new trends, sticking to past standards can make things feel outdated.
    • Interestingly libAdwaita also just did this.
    • If you update your Flatpak libAdwaita applications you’ll see they now use #222226 for dark and #ebebed for light.
    • Because there are many libAdwaita apps already in Flathub and since our own theme is already quite close to it in terms of colors, we’re adapting Mint-Y to use the same colors.
    • The difference in the light theme is subtle. It probably wouldn’t be noticed by someone who wasn’t told this had been done. The headers go from #e8e8e8 to #ebebed.
    • The difference is more visible in the dark theme, which also affects dark apps and the panel and cinnamon clutter elements in the default theme. This one is going from #2b2b2b to #222226 and #404040 to #2e2e33. It looks more modern but also much softer than before.
    • These changes bring the following improvements:
      • The themes look more modern
      • The dark theme and Cinnamon elements are softer and much nicer looking
      • Flatpak libAdwaita applications fit in a little bit better since they use the same colors
    • Accent Colors
    • We made a small change to the XDG Desktop Portal XApp to support accent colors.
    • The XApp desktop portal simply scans the GTK theme for a named color called “accent_color”. If this color is present it provides it via the XDG Settings API.
    • Put simply this changes the accent color in Flatpak libAdwaita applications based on your chosen GTK theme.
    • This works in Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. All that is needed is for the theme to define its “accent_color”.
    • Note to theme artists: This is a one-liner in your GTK CSS.
    • @define-color accent_color #9ab87c;
    • libAdwaita
    • A year ago we complained about libAdwaita, not because it was bad, but because it didn’t support us. Applications made with this library only properly integrated with GNOME and broke functionality in Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce.
    • With the release of Linux Mint 22, GNOME Apps which used libAdwaita were downgraded back to their GTK3 versions so that they could continue to function properly in the desktop environments we support. This was a temporary solution until these applications either got replaced, removed, forked, or until we found a way to continue to use them.
    • We’ve updated Mint-Y to use the same colors as libAdwaita. We also made the libAdwaita accent color follow the theme. This helps the integration but it’s only a small step towards properly integrating these applications. It doesn’t solve the issue with window controls and doesn’t help with other themes.
    • Whether we downgrade or fork applications, I know many of the GNOME developers are as sad as we are about this fragmentation and duplication of efforts. We were talking about extracting epub support in Xreader last week and making a new app. It would take between a week and a month to achieve the level of functionality we see in something like Foliate, but what’s the point long-term? Wouldn’t it be better for Foliate to work outside of GNOME and for us to use it?
    • Within our XApp discussions we talk about Qt, GTK3, application alternatives, forks and rewrites. What we looked at recently is slightly different. How do we make GNOME apps continue to work outside of GNOME?
    • Is there anything actually wrong with them once they follow the theme and provide proper window controls?
    • We gave it a try. We added libAdwaita stylesheets in Mint-X and Mint-Y and made a few changes in libAdwaita to not use its own stylesheet.
    • As you can see, the layout and style of libAdwaita widgets is different than in traditional GTK3 applications. It’s more touch friendly with sidepanes, split navigation headerbars rather than menubars and toolbars. It works really well for some of the apps though.
    • gnome-calendar, gnome-characters and foliate are libAdwaita applications. They integrate really well.
    • If we apply these patches to libAdwaita we probably won’t need to continue to downgrade the GNOME applications.
    • Upstream and long-term, if we continue to use libAdwaita applications we probably need an XApp platform lib similar to libAdwaita, either in the form of a soft-forks (libs and/or apps which are often rebased on upstream) or in the form of an extension library (something that extends libAdwaita, similar to libGranite).
    • Check the blog for various illustrations on the above topics.
  • Your Backblaze Backups Might Be in Trouble
    • from HowToGeek
    • Backblaze, the company behind the popular cloud backup service of the same name, has been accused of significant financial and organizational problems in a new report from Morpheus Research. If you use Backblaze, it might be a good idea to start looking for alternative services.
    • Backblaze is probably best known for its cloud personal computer backup service, which creates automated backups for computers and external drives with no stated limit on storage capacity. Backups can be recovered with a download, or they can be shipped to customers on an external drive. In recent years, Backblaze has expanded into cloud storage solutions for businesses and web services, as an alternative to Amazon S3. The company also publishes regular reports about the hard drives it uses in servers, which have been useful over the years for people choosing drives in their home servers.
    • Morpheus Research, an activist short seller firm, released a report this month outlining many problems with Backblaze’s corporate operations. Executives allegedly planned to “sell 10,000 shares a day,” then pressured employees to certify “inaccurate” financial statements. The current Chief Financial Officer of Backblaze is Marc Suidan, who previously worked at BeachBody (now “BODi”), a fitness and health company that operated as a multi-level marketing scheme (MLM) until late 2024. Morpheus alleges that Blackblaze is “lacking in transparency and willing to take aggressive and possibly illegal steps to create an illusion of financial performance to support their own exit liquidity.”
    • Some of this only matters for investors buying stock in Backblaze, but there are some worrying signs for anyone using it as their primary backup service. Backblaze is not profitable, and the company is losing more money now than when it became publicly traded in November 2021—it reported a loss of $14.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. It’s normal for companies to lose money for years in the hope they will become profitable (it took Uber over a decade), but Backblaze doesn’t appear to be heading in that direction, especially if the additional reporting from Morpheus Research is correct. If Backblaze suddenly shuts down, customers might lose access to existing backups.
    • Top view of the M4 Mac mini on a desk with accessories around it.
    • It’s important to note that Morpheus Research is a financial firm that investigates companies and shorts their stocks if they find evidence of corporate fraud. It’s similar to the better-known Hindenburg Research, and it’s staffed by some former Hindenburg researchers. Morpheus and other similar companies are not impartial groups, since they profit if the company’s stock price falls after the report is released, but much of the report lines up with existing public information.
    • Backblaze has not released a public statement about the report. We reached out to the company, and we will update this article when we hear back. If you are a Backblaze customer, you might want to start looking into alternative services for personal backups, like IDrive or pCloud.
    • UPDATE: 2025/04/28 16:58 EST BY CORBIN DAVENPORT
    • Statement From Backblaze
    • Backblaze said in a statement to How-To Geek, “we have already conducted independent third-party reviews that found no wrongdoing or issues with Backblaze’s public financial results; our storage cloud continues to deliver reliable, high-performance services that Backblaze customers rely on; and we remain fully focused on driving innovation and creating long-term value for our customers, employees, and investors.”
  • You can run Arch Linux in Windows now – here’s how
    • from ZDNet
    • In February, It’s Foss News reported that a WSL image for Arch Linux was on its way, and as of now, it has become official — Arch Linux is available. Windows Subsystem for Linux is a compatibility layer that allows the running of a full-blown Linux environment.
    • Up until this point, the only images available for WSL have been Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Remix, openSUSE, Kali Linux, and Pengwin. The addition of Arch delivers a rolling release distribution that should excite plenty of users, developers, and admins who want to finally try Arch.
    • This new addition comes by way of several Arch contributors, particularly Robin Candau, who is the official WSL Arch image maintainer. According to the official image site, “Images are built & released monthly (via GitLab CI schedule) and aim to provide the simplest but complete system to offer an outright Arch Linux experience with WSL (including systemd support).”
    • The site continues to say, “While images are built regularly, it is strongly recommended running pacman -Syu right after the first launch due to the rolling release nature of Arch Linux.”
    • To use the Arch Linux WSL image, you need to have WSL 2 installed, as WSL 1 is not supported.
    • For those who want to kick the tires of Arch Linux on Windows, you have to open PowerShell and then run the command:
      • wsl –install
    • Once you have WSL 2 installed, you can add Arch Linux with:
      • wsl –install archlinux
    • After the installation completes, boot Arch Linux with:
      • wsl -d archlinux
    • Remember, after you have booted, the first command you should run is to update everything, which is:
      • pacman -Syu
    • Thanks to WSL 2, it is also possible to run Linux GUI desktops and then access them via the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Do keep in mind, however, that the Linux images available to WSL 2 are all command-line based, which means you will need to manually install a desktop environment.
  • Linux Kernel to Drop Support for Legacy i486 and Early 586 CPUs Moss
    • from Linuxiac
    • These days, the i486 architecture is more of a relic from computer history books than something people use. To give you some perspective, we’re talking about CPUs from the 1990s. In other words, they’re really old.
    • But believe it or not, the Linux kernel still supports this ancient architecture. That said, this relic might finally be nearing its long-overdue retirement.
    • Just over a week ago, during a discussion about some kernel functionality on the kernel developers’ mailing list, Linus Torvalds wrapped up his message with the following:
      • I really get the feeling that it’s time to leave i486 support behind. There’s zero real reason for anybody to waste one second of development effort on this kind of issue.
    • And the answer wasn’t even late—it came before the next day. A long-time kernel developer, Ingo Molnar, posted a 15-patch RFC that would raise the hardware baseline for 32-bit x86 systems to processors equipped with a Time-Stamp Counter (TSC) and the CMPXCHG8B (“CX8”) instruction.
    • In plain English, that means bidding farewell to the 486 family and the earliest Pentium-class machines, so old they predate Windows 95.
    • Maintaining “compatibility glue” for chips that virtually nobody boots with today “is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve,” Molnar warned in the cover letter. So, a patch was submitted that removes or hard-wires several build-time options:
      • CPU options: M486, M486SX, early M586, WinChip, Elan, and assorted quirks disappear.
      • Platform support: Niche boards such as RDC321x and AMD’s 486-era Elan are scrubbed out.
      • FPU emulation: The venerable math-emu/ library—and the no387 boot flag—are deleted.
      • TSC and CX8: Both symbols become unconditional, erasing fallback paths for chips that lack them.
    • The cleanup expunges roughly 14,104 lines across 80 files, with a net addition of just 38 lines. Even after excluding the FPU emulator, the kernel still sheds over a thousand lines, a tidy saving for future maintainers.
    • If the patches are approved, this will be the first wholesale CPU drop-off since Linux 3.8 retired the i386 in 2012. Developers have floated the idea of jettisoning the i486 since at least 2022, but momentum finally coalesced after Torvald’s public nudge.
    • Lastly, who gets hurt? Practically speaking, very few, or to put it bluntly, no one. The last commercial i486 rolled off production lines in 2007, and modern kernels rarely run on such vintage silicon outside hobbyist retro-computing circles. For those edge-case users, older long-term-support kernels—or full-system emulators—remain viable escapes.
  • A new Raspberry Pi OS release
    • from Raspberry Pi blog
    • They’ve just published a new version of Raspberry Pi OS — the recommended (and free) operating system for all Raspberry Pi computers — and it’s now available for download. Scroll to the bottom of this post to find instructions for updating, or read on to find out what has changed.
    • As many of you already know, Debian Linux works on a two-year release cycle – every odd-numbered year, a new major version is released, and it being 2025, there will be one in the next few months.
    • So this is probably the final release of Raspberry Pi OS which is based on Debian ‘bookworm’, before Debian ‘trixie’ is released this summer. The last full release we made was back in November last year, and there have been quite a few changes since then, so here’s a summary of the most important.
    • We’ve installed a modified version of the swaylock screen locking application. Anyone who has used swaylock will be familiar with its somewhat minimal interface – when you lock the screen, you just get a completely white screen with no indication of what has happened or what you need to do. We felt this was a bit unhelpful, so we’ve added a custom front end which gives a bit more feedback as to what is happening and what you need to do to unlock it again!
    • You can now lock the screen by pressing Ctrl-Alt-L, or by choosing ‘Shutdown…’ from the main menu and selecting Lock Screen in the dialog. You’ll then see the lock screen, with a password entry box.
    • Type in your password, hit Enter, and the desktop should return.
    • Auto login options
    • In Linux desktops, it is usually possible to access a command-line console (known as a TTY) by pressing Ctrl-Alt and one of the function keys from 1 to 7. We have always set up Raspberry Pi Desktop so that if you boot to the desktop and enable auto login, then the TTY on Ctrl-Alt-F1 is also automatically logged in. If you use the screen lock described above, this gives a potential security hole, as the TTY switches are not disabled when the screen is locked.
    • What this means is that if you lock the screen, you should need to enter a password to be able to access the Raspberry Pi desktop again. But if a TTY is also logged in, someone can just hit Ctrl-Alt-F1, switch to the logged-in TTY, and gain access to the computer.
    • In order to prevent this, we have now separated console and desktop auto login options. On a new image, both console and desktop are automatically logged in, but if you want to prevent someone using this to get around the screen lock, we recommend turning off console auto login. There are now controls for this both in Raspberry Pi Configuration and in raspi-config.
    • New Printers application
    • To connect to and control printers, we have been shipping the system-config-printer application, which is a Python application with a slightly quirky and untidy user interface. For this release, we have ported the printer control plugin from the GNOME desktop control centre into a standalone Printers application (along with fixing a few of GNOME’s more puzzling user interface decisions…). The new application can be found in the Preferences section of the main menu, and should hopefully make managing printers a bit more intuitive.
    • Better touchscreen handling
    • Touchscreen handling in Wayland is relatively new and sometimes doesn’t do everything you might hope. We hit a problem when we first moved to Wayland in that some touch features, like the ability to double-click, were simply not available, and we had to find a workaround.
    • What we did was to enable mouse emulation by default, whereby touchscreens just pretend to be mice – when you tap the touchscreen, it generates a mouse click instead of a touch, and if you tap it twice, it generates a double-click. The problem with this was that it meant that touch-specific features, like swiping the screen to scroll, were disabled, and some people noticed their absence.
    • For this release, we are making it easy for touchscreen users to choose whether they want mouse emulation behaviour, or native touchscreen behaviour. There is a new menu under the ‘Touchscreen’ section of the context-sensitive menu in Screen Configuration.
    • The main disadvantage of no longer using mouse emulation is that it isn’t possible to double-click by tapping the screen twice, and this makes navigation in the file manager rather difficult. There are a couple of workarounds specific to the file manager: you can enable ‘Open files with single click’ in the file manager preferences, or use a tap-and-hold to open the context-sensitive menu and then choose ‘Open’.
    • Hopefully, at some point Wayland touchscreen support will be mature enough that it is no longer necessary to offer this option, but in the meantime, this lets users choose their preferred behaviour.
    • Other changes
    • This release is running version 0.8.1 of the labwc Wayland window manager – this is a couple of releases behind the very latest version, but has had a lot of testing and is very stable. We’ll be updating this to a newer version in the near future. We are also now running on version 6.12 of the Linux kernel for this release.
    • The Squeekboard virtual keyboard for use with touchscreens has been modified to allow users with multiple monitor configurations to choose the screen on which it is shown – the relevant option is on the Display tab of Raspberry Pi Configuration.
    • Unfortunately, due to changes made by the authors of the Chromium web browser, it is no longer possible to pre-install the uBlock Origin adblocker. As a result of this, from this release onwards, we are pre-installing the slightly less full-featured uBlock Origin Lite.
    • A lot of work has gone into optimising the startup of the wf-panel-pi application used to create the taskbar in Wayland, and this has resulted in a noticeable improvement in the time taken for the desktop to start after the Raspberry Pi is booted.
    • In another performance optimisation, we have stopped using the zenity tool to create prompts and dialogs from the command line, and have written a more efficient tool of our own, called zenoty – this saves installing some packages which were slowing down startup.
    • There have also been a lot of changes under the hood aimed at making maintenance of the desktop more straightforward and easer to manage going forward into trixie, but they shouldn’t (hopefully) be noticed by most users.
    • And of course there have been dozens of the usual small tweaks to fix bugs, add new translations, and just generally tidy things up.
    • How do I get it?
    • As is usual, you can do most of the update automatically via apt. Just open a terminal and type
      • sudo apt update
      • sudo apt full-upgrade
    • While the upgrade is in progress, you may get prompts asking you to confirm changes to configuration files; just answer Y for yes to these.
    • If you want to write a fresh image to an SD card or other media, visit our software page, where you can download Raspberry Pi Imager – the most straightforward way for most users to prepare a new SD card – or browse download options to install manually.
    • We hope you find the new changes useful – as always, do let us have any feedback in the comments or on the forums.
  • The End of 10 group aims to save Windows 10 PCs from landfills using Linux Moss
    • from XDA-developers
    • With Windows 10 losing support in October, people are looking for a way to protect their PCs from threats. If you ask Microsoft for a solution, it’ll be very pleased to tell you that you should just get rid of all that hardware and buy a new Windows 11 PC. However, it’s not the only thing you can do by a long shot; in fact, one can easily argue that this route is the most wasteful. If your PC runs just fine, why throw it out just because Microsoft wants you to?
    • If you don’t want to get rid of perfectly good hardware, installing Linux is one alternative. If that sounds interesting, you’ll want to check out “End of 10,” a volunteer group dedicated to keeping processors out of the landfill and putting them to good use.
    • As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, End of 10’s primary goal is to educate people on how they can keep their computers around when Windows 10 falls out of support without being a security risk. The group’s main method is to swap out Windows for Linux, which doesn’t have the same “expiry dates” as Windows has. That way, you can have what End of 10 calls a “brand-new old computer,” which you can keep using as long as you’d like.
    • Here’s how End of 10 describes itself:
      • If you bought your computer after 2010, there’s most likely no reason to throw it out. By just installing an up-to-date Linux operating system you can keep using it for years to come.
      • Installing an operating system may sound difficult, but you don’t have to do it alone. With any luck, there are people in your area ready to help!
    • Clicking the “Find someone to help you” button brings you to a directory of stores and places that signed up to the End of 10 project. These folks will gladly set up Linux on your computer and help you get started with your new OS. If nobody is around to help, you can instead check out the group’s guides on how to install Linux yourself. Trust me, it’s not as scary as you might imagine.
    • Fortunately, it seems the idea of moving to Linux when Windows 10 “dies” is gaining momentum. We’ve already seen PewDiePie give his blessings to Linux Mint in a move that inspired me to consider using the operating system when Windows 10 falls out of support. Maybe this will be the moment that Linux needs to propel its own user base to higher heights.

— Play Security Transition Bumper —

Security and Privacy

10 minutes

  • openSUSE Removes Deepin Desktop Over Security Policy Violations Moss
    • from Linuxiac
    • In recent development, the openSUSE project has decided to remove the Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE), well-known for its polished visuals and user-friendly experience, from its repositories, citing substantial packaging policy violations.
    • According to disclosures from the openSUSE security team, a troubling workaround was discovered in the DDE packaging. Specifically, the Deepin community packager introduced a “license agreement” dialog within the deepin-feature-enable package, effectively circumventing standard security review processes required by openSUSE.
    • Ordinarily, components such as D-Bus system service configurations and Polkit policies must undergo stringent review by the SUSE security team before being whitelisted for inclusion in openSUSE distributions.
    • In this case, however, the discovered “license agreement” allowed users to bypass these security checks, installing components flagged by the security team as potentially unsafe simply by accepting the license.
    • This practice emerged during routine security reviews in January 2025, revealing that key Deepin components, such as the deepin-daemon and file manager, had bypassed formal review processes altogether.
    • Although the Deepin packager likely did not intend malicious harm and openly communicated the security concerns via the “license agreement,” the approach was nonetheless deemed unacceptable due to clear violations of openSUSE’s packaging policies and the potential security risks posed to users.
    • The deeper issue, however, is rooted in the historically strained interactions between openSUSE security teams and Deepin’s upstream developers.
    • Reports indicate recurring security concerns, insufficient vulnerability remediation, and inconsistent communication, possibly exacerbated by language barriers (Deepin is a Chinese Linux distro heavily targeting users in China) and limited upstream resources. Consequently, maintaining a secure and reliable integration of Deepin within openSUSE has become increasingly untenable.
      • Given the security record of Deepin and the concerns expressed in the previous section, we don’t recommend the use the Deepin desktop at this time.
    • In response to these developments, openSUSE will entirely remove Deepin Desktop from the Tumbleweed rolling release and the forthcoming Leap 16.0 distribution. For Leap 15.6 users, only the problematic deepin-feature-enable package will be removed.
    • For users who wish to continue using Deepin despite acknowledged security concerns, openSUSE suggests manually adding the Deepin development project repositories. Nevertheless, users are urged to exercise caution given the outlined security risks.
  • Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law
    • From techradar.com
    • Proton confirms the company will leave Switzerland if new controversial surveillance rules pass.
    • Switzerland is considering amending its surveillance law, with experts warning against the risk to secure encryption and online anonymity in the country. Specifically, the amendment could require all VPN services, messaging apps, and social networks to identify and retain user data – an obligation that is now limited to mobile networks and internet service providers.
    • The firm behind one of the best VPN and encrypted email services, Proton, is ready to fight back on behalf of the privacy of its over 100 million users. Other Swiss-based companies, like NymVPN, are also doing the same.
    • In an interview with RTS (Radio Télévision Suisse) on May 13, 2025, Proton CEO Andy Yen slammed the proposed amendment as a “major violation of the right to privacy” that will also harm the country’s reputation and its ability to compete on an international level.
    • “This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia,” said Yen.
    • The amendment aims to expand the number of service providers targeted to include so-called “derived service providers”. Crucially, the new provisions will introduce three new types of information and two types of monitoring.
    • If the changes pass, Proton will be forced to modify how Proton Mail and Proton VPN handle encryption, alongside its strict no-log policies – something the company isn’t willing to do.
    • “I think we would have no choice but to leave Switzerland,” said Yen. “The law would become almost identical to the one in force today in Russia. It’s an untenable situation. We would be less confidential as a company in Switzerland than Google, based in the United States. So it’s impossible for our business model.”
    • Proton is not alone in feeling this way, though.
    • A new player in the VPN world, NymVPN has also been publicly fighting Swiss government plans since the beginning.
    • Talking to TechRadar, Nym’s co-founder and COO, Alexis Roussel, confirmed that Nym will do the same and leave Switzerland if the new surveillance rules are enforced.
    • As public consultations ended on May 6, 2025, we will now have to wait and see what the Swiss government decides.
    • Nonetheless, Roussel confirmed to TechRadar that there has been significant push-back from political parties and Swiss companies.
    • Some Cantons, including Geneva, have even called on the right to digital integrity as an argument against these rules. Roussel was the main originator of the initiative that introduced this new right to protect citizens’ online privacy and data – in Geneva in 2023 and Neuchâtel in 2024 – with over 90% consensus.
    • Yen also told RTS to be more optimistic, despite pointing out how this matter shows the need for a more balanced approach when it comes to crafting new laws.
    • “If we can get Bern to adopt common-sense rules that allow companies like Proton to be competitive in Switzerland and around the world, I will stay, take my passport, and continue to invest in Switzerland,” he added.

— Play Wanderings Transition Bumper —

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

30 minutes (~5-8 mins each)

  • Bill
    • Well once again I’ve been away for various reasons; one of which being the technical fail the show experienced last week. I’m compelled to assume one hundred percent of the responsibility for the outage last week that accounted for the lack of show. For what seems like no reason at all, I suffered a complete internet outage. At first, I assumed the reason was that my ISP was burying new fiber in the area. This is because I got a notification the week prior that this was going to happen. When I got in touch with tech support they informed me that this was in fact not the reason, so the mystery continues. We should be back on schedule next week with episode 462.
    • Well, I purchased a new phone, the second of which in less than three months. I say new; I always buy refurbished phones from Amazon so as to get a proper flagship phone without the flagship price. I upgraded my Samsung Note 10 plus to the S20 plus a few months ago. The phone was fine, but I was really missing the large screen of the note phones so I went ahead and gave the s20 to my wife and ordered a refurbished Note 20 Ultra. Honestly if there’s any difference between it and the Note 10 plus in terms of performance, it’s barely noticeable. I suppose the camera is much improved, but that’s pretty much it from my point of view. When you buy phones refurbished, you are assuming some risk. I’ve never really had a problem until now, and I’m not a hundred percent sure I know what is going on. There seems to be a problem with the USB-C port on the device because the headphone, MTP, and Debug Bridge capability only works intermittently. At first I thought it may be a third party piece of software causing the problem given how devices I own typically end up being a hodgepodge of software from different sources including F-Droid and straight from GitHub. I tried booting in “safe mode” which produced no results, I then did a full factory reset which again only produced intermittent reliability. I’ve resolved myself to the idea that is just isn’t going to work. I will rely on Bluetooth for sound. The odd thing is that charging works just fine every time and Samsung DeX which I rely on heavily works fine too. I will probably use the phone for a while and upgrade in a few months.
    • I’ve been on vacation for the last few days. I needed a bit of a break to recharge, and get some things done that have been put on the back burner for some time. I meant to install Arch on this machine and run it for a while so as to take advantage of features in the later versions of the Linux Kernel, adding support for a Focusrite device I purchased a couple years ago which until now had sketchy support on Linux. For some time now, support for some of the most popular Focusrite Scarlett devices have been working well on Linux, and the ALSA Scarlett config tool works great for those devices. One device absent from that support was until now the Vocaster One, which is a device purpose built for podcasting. I had planned to get Arch up and running on this device to get that device working, but honestly I’ve spent more time during my staycation on little excursions with my wife and kids and have spent very little time on computer stuff.
  • Joe
    • Well it has been another slow couple of weeks. I didn’t want to buy a new bed for my 3D printer which either has a warped bed or something wrong that I can’t find with the X arm. So I decided to get some Capton tape and use that to lift the low spots on the bed. This worked well enough to get things printing again but I think that I am still having an issue with the extrusion rate. I will probably need to get a new motor for the extruder but that is a really easy swap and recalibrate. Then we will see what needs to be replaced next.
    • I don’t want to do too much since I know that I will be getting a different printer sometime this year but I also want to be able to get this working well enough to give to my son.
    • That being said I am also trying to redo a lot of the prints for the mini rack before things start getting really hot in Texas. I have it printed in PLA right now and I have my concerns about how well that will hold up.
    • So I have started reprinting in PETG. I also found some different STLs with thicker rails that should make cable management and cooling a bit easier. I just need to come up with a couple of different designs for some of the other parts that I am using on the other rack.
    • I will need to design a top cover and a mount for a large fan on the bottom. It will need to be thick enough to support a wifi router and I will need to design a mount for the small monitor that I will be adding to it, Preferably in such a way that it can be folded down for transport.
    • This rack looks to be wider and taller than the previous one but i am hoping to put the extra room to work for cable management and proper cooling.
    • As well I have a different power supply that should be quieter to use for the drive bay and I will need to design a mounting bracket that will allow proper airflow and keep everything from getting in the way and I have different extension cables for the drives that need to be added so that they can be accessed individually.
    • I am thinking that the PS will use 1.5U on the rack and will be in the back. So in front of that I should be able to either put some 2.5 inch drives or I could put in some Pis and maybe the keystone jacks at the front.
    • Additionally this will mean that I will need a different mount for the power button of the new power supply. I have some ideas for this already and just need to start designing and prototyping.
    • I also had some interesting hardware work. I had previously purchased an electric screw gun from a goodwill in el paso while i was there. I have used it a few times but it was not very powerful and it would die off quickly. So probably a battery issue. i figured it would use an 18650 style battery and i have plenty of those that i can repurpose. But in opening it i found that it actually had 3 1.2 volt batteries run in series powering it. They were about the size of AA i think and that height is not enough clearance for an 18650. But it is a similar size to a 14500. I had one of those lying around not doing anything anyway and 1.2×3 is close enough to the 3.7v rating of the 14500 that it should not cause any issues. Had to get creative with the soldering iron and adding some wire and with the kapton tape of which i currently have plenty and the thing is working like new. I think the only thing left to test is the charging and making sure it doesnt go boom.
    • My nextcloud setup went away again. Which tells me that there is an issue with my docker setup. Well that and i started using watchtower and applying updates which means that when i set up my nextcloud on docker i didnt set a proper local volume for the config and this is causing my problems. I think i will likely just bite the bullet and move everything over to an LXC on the rack and see how things work then.
    • I am also helping a fellow veteran start a weight lifting support group here in the DFW. He does a lot of outreach for vets and has had trouble getting this particular group off the ground. Maybe it goes nowhere but it does mean that i will be doing a lot more IRL. It is what i was doing during the last show.
  • Moss
    • I’ve started getting more jobs at the high school. Good thing, I’ve been behind my minimum quota and this will pull me back over it. And the school year ends May 21st, so there’s not much more to go.
    • I’ve been coming home from those jobs completely knackered. There is no physical work other than walking to and from the classroom, the lunchroom, and the restrooms. So I’m just petering out in my advanced years.
    • I haven’t really gotten to work on my Surface Pro 6th Gen, it’s just sitting there waiting for me. Ditto for the Kindle HD 8, although since I still have Kindle Unlimited I may want to hold off on that. So I’ve mostly been treading water.
    • I now have my memberships and hotel room purchased for SELF in June. It was hard to get the room, the hotel’s website was really messed up. But after all these years of yearning, I’m finally going to go.
    • I got a Telegram message from Dale on Wednesday that I was going to receive a package on Thursday. That package turned out to be his 2021 System76 Pangolin laptop (pang10). I’ve been driving myself crazy trying to reconfigure this for my needs, as I tried using Pop!_OS as installed but it was not a winner for me. Lots of head banging. I installed Bodhi on it, but could not get Mint on it due to some hangup in resizing the partition. It was a major shock to receive this, and it took several hours before my brain was at full function (well, as full as it gets). Might be better to have an installation of Mint, and then try to get Bodhi on it later.
    • On Friday, Dale told me via Telegram that he had only been able to get Pop! And Fedora to install on it. He also said he didn’t have the problem with his current machine, a newer System76 model. So now I downloaded elementary OS to see if that will work, and Pop!_OS just in case I need to put that back on. Good to know it wasn’t just me, and also I added Bodhi to the list of successful distros. The main problem with Bodhi on this machine is that it would ONLY display in 4K, and I couldn’t manage to even get the magnification to work.
    • I am happy to report that elementaryOS installed without the slightest headache, and I have opened discussion with Dani on Mastodon to let her know and ask a question regarding PPA usage on elementary.
    • And now, on Saturday, I discovered that I was wrong about Elementary. I had seen that as a “private garden” system, but Dani has done many incredible things with it and you can now install PPAs as you like. So I got the System76 PPA installed Saturday afternoon (just before the team meeting), and then the System76 drivers, and then did an upgrade, which got me a new kernel and more. The machine looks great, runs beautifully. My next project is to come to understand elementaryOS better, the biggest part of which appears to be remembering that the X is on the top left. This machine has gone from a beautiful headache I was plotting to see how much I could get for it, to a beautiful Linux machine you’ll never pry my cold, dead hands from. Anybody interested in buying a lovely Lenovo T580, i5, 16 GB, 512 NVMe, and touchscreen?
    • No music lately, just haven’t felt up to it. But Suzanne has started asking me more often to play for her, so I might get my calluses back after all. I’ve been seeing some new instruments I would love to have, but unless and until I can start making money with my music, they will have to wait.
  • Eric
    • ISP upgrade and new WiFi setup
      • Issues with my Synology setup made me want to upgrade to something else
        • Constant random reboots
        • Underpowered hardware and slow performance overall
        • Positive side is the filtering rules
      • I had been on the same plan with my ISP for at least five years
        • Hadn’t logged into the site for years. Finally did and was prompted to upgrade for free from 500/500 Mbps to 1/1 Gbps for the same price or 2/2 Mbps for $5 more per month. The 2 Gbps option also meant new ONT and router hardware. The new router is an eero Pro 6E which is one I was interested in trying as an alternative to the Synology.
      • Extending ISP’s WIFI Network
        • I had to use the Synology setup for a bit longer while I waited for the additional 6Es to arrive. New ones were around $200 apiece on Amazon but used ones were less than $50 on eBay.
        • When they arrived I wasn’t able to add them to the network using the Android app.
        • I used my ISP’s chat support to ask what I was doing wrong and realized that they must have some type of access control so they need to add the device serial numbers to the allow list. Once they did I was able to add the additional routers.
        • One of the additional routers is in my living room and uses a wired backhaul. The other one is a few rooms away and used wireless only.
        • The throughput is way way better and having WiFi 6 is nice.
        • The app offers filtering for my kid to block porn, social media, and so on.

— Play Innards Transition Bumper —

Linux Innards

30 minutes (~5-8 minutes each)

–Play Bodhi Corner Transition Bumper*–

Bodhi Corner

(3-5 minutes)

  • I just want to talk briefly about Themes in Bodhi. Unlike most other distros, Bodhi has 17 unique themes at last count, and none of them are made to mimic any versions of Windows, MacOS, or other desktops. Each one has a complete set of icons, colors, and wallpaper (of course you can use any wallpaper you like), change the look of your desktop almost completely, and never require to you re-add your icons to the desktop or taskbar. (By comparison, in Zorin OS and others, every time you pick a different theme you have to repopulate, or even relocate, your taskbar.) There is not much more I can say about this other than to encourage you to try Bodhi and play around with the various themes. I also find it fun to move around the gadgets and modules to make it pop out even more – I have a lot of fun moving and resizing the Moon module on different themes, for instance, and I have my preferences on where to locate the clock and workspaces.
  • I further encourage you to drop in regularly on the Bodhi page of Distrowatch to get our counts up, and join us in our forums and Discord channel.

Shape 1 — Play Vibrations Transition Bumper —

Vibrations from the Ether

20 minutes (~5 minutes each)

— Play Check This Transition Bumper —

Check This Out

10 minutes

Cinnamon Profile Manager (via londoner)

Just released on Friday 2025-05-16

Features

Create profiles from your current Cinnamon settings

Switch between profiles to quickly change your entire desktop environment

Import/Export profiles to share configurations between computers

Automatic backups before making changes to your settings

Manual backups for extra safety

More info at https://github.com/ClaytonTDM/cinnamon-profile-manager

NOTE: This is a third-party app. It was not developed by the Mint team.

Housekeeping & Announcements

  • Thank you for listening to this episode of mintCast!
  • If you see something that you think we should be talking about, tell us!

Send us email at [email protected]

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Wrap-up

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>

— Play Closing Music and Standard Outro —

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