Maybe it’s just I’m a relative noob to build systems, but gosh, do I love Meson.

The documentation’s pretty okay - not perfect, but better than cmake - and it feels like I can actually learn it by example through looking at other projects’ setups.

I can live with using other build systems for other projects, but for personal projects, I’ll always choose Meson. I’ll always push for it if a project I’m working on needs to choose a build system.

You could do signup through a form and just throw a QR code on a poster.

My university Linux Users Group usually uses Crytpad (which is FOSS and seems federated, and has a flagship instance) to create forms for votes, so that might do the trick for you.

Maybe ask around and request to put up posters in a local library?

Also, see if your local university has a group already, and maybe if the age difference isn’t creepy, see if you can hang with them.

Zaphod’s just zis guy, you know?

It gets less essential the more memory you have, though I have 32GB of RAM on my desktop and still have 32GB swap space, which is probably way overkill, but I can afford it for now become I have a 2TB SSD that still has several hundred gigabytes left and could probably have a bit freed. With the memory shortage caused by “artificial intelligence” companies, I may have to go less crazy on the storage now, though.

If I had any close friends who used Linux, I would install this for April fools.

That just sounds like insufficient swap space, honestly. For part of the summer of 2024, I used a laptop from 2016 with 8 GB of RAM as my man portable devicr. The swap partition size I used was fine for most things but a but small; however, I’d occasionally run Spleeter and run out of memory, leading to the issues you experienced, which were alleviated by just adding a temporary swap file. Before that, I used a gen 1 Surface Go, also with 8 GB RAM.

I don’t like Ubuntu, but objectively, this is probably a hardware issue and not a software issue.

I mean, you can try another distro to be sure, but the chances of it solving the issue are slim.

Wait… It’s a used stick? For future reference, that’s a key piece of information. I’m guessing it had a life before it was a server, making it older than 3 years. Depending on the history of the old laptop, I’d guess there’s a solid chance that stick is just worn out.

I’d disagree on the 16GB part. It’s nice to have, but I think 8GB is perfectly fine for most non-gaming use cases. Heck, a couple years ago, I used a laptop from 2010 with 4GB quite comfortably.

I mean, get at least 16GB if you can, especially in a dev setup, but 8 GB hasn’t murdered that many people yet.

I mean, that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that’s why Debian’s doing it.

If they were solving just that, then they would have just pushed for something like a reproducible tarball where you can point to a commit, branch, tag, etcetera from which that tarball can be reproduced and not bother migrating their package format.

Debian has a serious ease-of-packaging issue that I’ve witnessed first-hand, and I think they’ve made it clear that it’s moreso the ease factor they’re focused on that the security factor.

Not really. If xz were the issue, Debian would have just switched to a different tarball format like lz4.

This is more about Debian packaging conventions being very archaic and requiring a lot of futzing with upstream tarballs and patches.

I have an E16 gen 1 AMD that I run in a similar configuration- 8 GB soldered + 16 GB SODIMM. I’ve had no problems.

I’d recommend what others have suggested - try reseating the RAM and run a memory test. Also, what distro are you using, not that it’ll necessarily help.

Most software on that front works. I usually just use Cura for slicing.

Weird. Guess it’s a crazy fluke.

Honestly, AV1 software decode isn’t that bad on most recent hardware. My desktop with 2018 hardware does it just fine, and so does my 2023 laptop.

Try e-mailing them. I don’t know about that specific mirror, but I use the University of Arizona mirror, and when issues came up, they got back to me pretty quick about what was going on.

That sounds more like something weird about the card itself than with the driver; “power saving feature” makes me think a faulty hardware ACPI implementation by the card vendor is to blame. I’ve had a similar thing happen with my Wi-Fi modem where it would completely crash and only a reboot would fix it; I too have to do special kernel options to get it working.

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.

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this.

I’m very squeamish about adding more than the bare minimum external repos, though less so about extrepo stuff. I’m honestly worried this is just going to make it very easy for people to find new ways to break their systems; then again, that may be less likely to happen for the user demographic of Debian, and in the end, that’s no reason not to add a feature this convenient.