Notices by Vagrant Cascadian (vagrantc@floss.social)

@mntmn

Wow! These are the kind of specs that might make it worth upgrading!

Exactly the reason I actually got the MNT Reform in the first place, the possibility of modular upgrades and repair parts is real!

Especially using standard parts... I had one battery cell die the other day, and I swapped the battery cells out with ones I had on hand... (Had six unused compatible cells on hand, and pulled two out of flashlights).

Have a presentation you are itching to give?

#TIL #LWN apparently keeps a list of upcoming deadlines!

https://lwn.net/Calendar/Monthly/cfp/

And if you are looking to attend events:

https://lwn.net/Calendar/

If you are attending in-person events, please take responsible health precautions!

@frameworkcomputer

Did I say it was fixed? Now it is not working even harder, at all, on any port. And the USB-C hub that I used to be able to plug USB-A devices into and have them work? No longer working either.

@frameworkcomputer

Downgrading the firmware to 3.10 made everything work again, but... for how long?

I am not sure if I want to reflash the firmware every time I want to plug in a USB device!

Though I guess... reflashing the firmware really seems CPU intensive, kicking the fans at full tilt... a different kind of hot-swap?

I really want to like this laptop, but my confidence at this point is ... challenging.

#FrameworkLaptop is finally working after doing a full mainboard reset!

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Fully+Resetting+the+Mainboard+State/113?lang=en

There is a bug where the RTC battery to drains too low to recharge under normal conditions and the reset fixes that somehow.

Not sure why that would cause issues for the USB ports, but for the last week it seems to be working reliably! Whew!

Tech support actually seemed to support running #Debian reasonably well despite it not being an officially supported operating system.

@frameworkcomputer

So the #FrameworkLaptop folks responded to my support request in under 30 minutes! Impressive.

Suggested updating the #BIOS firmware to the latest version, 3.17... and that worked!

The update process was a little ugly, as it removed the entry to boot #Debian and was stuck in a boot loop reinstalling the BIOS... it was reinstalled at least three times!

Was tricky to reinstall grub from debian-installer in rescue mode, but eventually worked.

Picked up a #FrameworkLaptop
and there are a lot of nice things about a laptop designed to be taken apart and put back together again!

Running #Debian bookworm and it mostly works ok.

Unfortunately, for a while I was convinced the USB-A adapters were not working, but apparently, they work fine on the left side ports, just not on the right side.

HDMI and USB-C work fine on the right side ports, so the ports are not completely broken...

Anyone else encountered this issue?

@frameworkcomputer

@mntmn

Looks like you are exploring using more than two keycap sizes?

For everything I liked about using only two keycaps for reform2 ... I might actually go for a more "conventional" layout in the end.

I remapped the reform2 layout in firmware, only to discover... no really, I need the ctrl key both to the left of the A key *and* at the edge of the keyboard.

I also wish for all smaller keys to the left of the spacebar for more flexible remapping.

But enough about *my* opinions...

@mntmn

Been using #i3 and lately #Sway for years, which mostly work fine for me, though currently exploring switching out bits of my desktop environment, so curious to see how this develops!

Given the sheer number of desktop environments out there, what are the main goals of this new one that might set it apart?

I noticed wayfire is already packaged in #Debian, but I do not see sfwbar or nwggrid. I don't see any of these packages in #Guix

...Packaging is, of course, fixable. :)

Tried switching to the #pinebookpro last month, but stalled out when #firefox would just consume CPU and display no window.

The solution is simple... if a bit confusing... It works when exporting any of the following the environment variable:

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=false
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=whatever

The only thing that doesn't work is MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=

Environment variable booleans where "set is true, unset is false" are way too confusing.

#firefox seems to have fixed the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND being treated as an unset or set boolean ... with arbitrarily confusing things being set to enable it, such as "0" or "false" or "pleasedotnotenablewayland".

Apparently only MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 is valid now.

This is much less confusing. Yay!