Linux on phones and tablets is a thing. Typing from my Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro running postmarketOS and LibreWolf.

How is the external display connected? I have never seen Freesync over HDMI work. The early implementations were AMD proprietary and the new ones require HDMI 2.1 which has some ridiculous bullshit about not being implemented by open source drivers. HDMI sucks, use DisplayPort if possible. If your laptop doesn’t have a DisplayPort connector, try a USB-C to DisplayPort cable, as usually the type C ports on laptops support DisplayPort alt mode.

Pretty much all ext4 except for a few Windows installs on NTFS.

Maybe this explains why my webcam indicator is on when no applications are using it. It’s been confusing me for a while now. I’ve double checked anything that I expect to access it is not, and it doesn’t seem to be locked because opening it works, but it sometimes boots up woth the light on. I am using Arch with pipewire so I’ll check and see if this is what’s going on.

I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don’t need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.

I’m not sure about FF specifically, but 99% of the time you’re connecting a microcontroller to a PC you’re doing so over a serial port (UART) of some sort. It may be a physical COM port or it may be a USB to serial adapter or even a purely virtual serial port over a USB connection, but the methodology is all the same. Unless you are running a serial terminal on that port (as in, a commandline on your PC served on the given /dev/ttyX interface, not a terminal emulator letting you read/write from the port), the microcontroller can’t just run scripts on the PC. Instead, you will want to write a script/program that opens the port and waits for a command to be sent from the microcontroller, then that listener script can execute whatever functionality you require. Note that only one application can have the port active at a time, so if your listener is a separate program from your event handler, you will have to close the port on the listener before running the handler, then reopen the port on the listener once the handler is done so it can start listening for the next event. Better to just make it all one program that is always running on the PC and does both listening for events and handling them so there’s only one program that needs access to the serial port.

It’s not specific to Microsoft, but the general idea of letting proprietary software install whatever it wants whenever it wants directly into your kernel is a bad idea regardless. If the user had any control over this update process, organizations could do small scale testing themselves before unleashing the update on their entire userbase. If it were open source software, the code would be reviewed by many more eyes and tested independently by many more teams before release. The core issue is centralizing all trust on one organization, especially when that organization is a business and thus profit-driven above all else which could be an incentive to rush updates.

It’s also a “don’t allow third party proprietary shit into your kernel” issue. If the driver was open source it would actually go through a public code review and the issue would be more likely to get caught. Even if it did slip through people would publically have a fix by now with all the eyes on the code. It also wouldn’t get pushed to everyone simultaneously under the control of a single company, it would get tested and packaged by distributions before making it to end users.

NVK is already usable, performancr isn’t 100% of the proprietary driver but I play Overwatch on NVK at 165FPS on my RTX3070 laptop a lot, low settings but very playable. This is with an Optimus configuration (VRR Freesync panel on AMD iGPU) in GNOME Wayland.

I don’t care if it’s “better” than the existing system, Mozilla should not be helping the advertising industry at all. They should be actively working to block any and all attempts to gain access to user data, flat out. They are not, and their acquisition of an ad company shows that their motives are not in line with what their users want. They’re a company after money, no different than any other. Big fucking shame, but when you hire business people and operate as a business, you can’t have true integrity no matter what your supposed mission is. Yes, Mozilla operates a nonprofit but they also operate a corporation, and the corporation exists to make money above all else which is why they’ve succumbed to this ad industry bullshit. I hope we see a viable third option for browser, but until then the best option is a Firefox fork that actually gives a damn about the user and not just their wallets. I’ve switched to using LibreWolf on all of my devices. Like Firefox, but without the anti-user, pro-ad-industry garbage turned on by default. I’ve been calling Firefox adware for years now ever since they started stuffing Mozilla VPN ads, sponsored link garbage, “Pocket recommendations” horseshit, and all the other paid/sponsored nonsense in users’ faces without their permission but people were like “no no Mozilla is actually good”…cut it out, Mozilla has shown their hands very clearly now. They want the advertising $$$ and are willing to give up any respect and integrity they used to have for it. They aren’t at the level of Chrome and Google, but they’re inching closer every day and acquiring their own ad company certainly isn’t going to help in that regard.

Even if so, it would likely still have proprietary blobs, just embedded into a ROM or flash chip on the card. Personally, I’d rather have firmware loaded at runtime over hard-coded, at least then the blob is able to be reverse engineered possibly.

I just donate by whatever means the project offers. Sometimes it’s paypal, sometimes patreon, sometimes GitHub sponsorship, sometimes something else like OpenCollective. Read the readme or homepage of the project to see what options they take.