There’s a few different ways for you to probe for info on your USB devices:

lsusb - lists pretty much everything usb related, including root hubs on your motherboard

For a more readable lsusb output you can lsusb -v | grep -E '\<(Bus|iProduct|bDeviceClass|bDeviceProtocol)' 2>/dev/null in my experience it can be helpful to slap a sudo on the beginning as well because sometimes certain devices can’t be polled without root privileges.

usb-devices - similar to lsusb but produces much more detailed (but less human readable) information

find /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb*/ -name dev - produces a list of where the system saves information on usb devices. Each of the listed folders will hold a lot of files with a wealth of information on each usb device, but be very careful and do not edit these files.

You can also do this to see what the system is doing in the background and then try plugging and unplugging devices from the offending usb ports:

watch "dmesg | tail -20"

You’ll at least be able to see if the system is registering anything at all when trying to use those ports, or if it’s as though the system doesn’t see them at all.

I have a similar issue on my Lenovo ThinkBook but the ports don’t work in any OS despite being enabled in the UEFI. I still haven’t figured out what is wrong with them, but it seems they may just be toast. Thankfully the USB-C ports still work and I can just connect a hub to one of those.

I have so many reasons to not use Kagi.

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20240412153748/https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770/

Yeah, pretty sure it was called “Fex” translation layer for emulating x86 binaries on ARM64. To me that was absolutely the biggest takeaway, because that’s a massive game-changer for eventually moving the industry away from x86 exclusivity and into wider adoption of other architectures.

RSS support is absolutely my favorite old-web thing that’s still around. It truly is fantastic to have your own curated RSS feeds.

The Fediverse specifically lets you create them really granularly as well!

Misleading title.

There are indeed “weird blogs” they just have to be devoid of capitalist funding.

Corey Doctorow’s Pluralistic seems in many ways to be a natural extension of his BoingBoing days albeit a bit more serious than the lighthearted BoingBoing.

MetaFilter fully became a non-profit and still retains a more a blog-esque format than it’s contemporaries.

Mother Jones has a strong online presence and has avoided the capitalist machine for it’s entire existence.

The thing is (and the more important part of this story is) that submitting to the capitalist machine is to submit to its machinations and unwillingness to adhere to the age-old social contract of a business producing profit to be sufficient enough for a business to exist. Modern capitalism is indeed a shell-game of extracting maximum value, essentially truly squeezing blood from a stone until the stone no longer even exists. Anyone who willingly plays this game will be bitten by this game, unless they themselves become ruthless capitalists and focus all their energy on shell-game chicanery over producing actual products, services, or content. There is no end-game here where the plucky capitalist-minded business-owner can overcome all and become the master of their own domain. The few who have (Valve, for example) had a solid financial footing to begin their more unique forays into profit-driving and they have stayed independent companies instead of publicly owned companies. That alone has saved them, and most of them (again, like Valve) started in an era before the behemoth of VC (Vulture/Vampire Capitalism) took hold, and made their early profits soon enough to not need such outside funding. Starting such a company today? Without outside funding? Get real. You’d have to be someone like Gabe Newell, who exited Microsoft with enough money to take a risk to make a profit of his own without needing outside stake, and the number of Gabe Newell’s exiting industry to make their own goes at new business are exceedingly rare. The ones that actually succeed in making a profitable company are even rarer.

In capitalist America, the “free market” binds you and dictates your future.

Sometimes you just cant beat the classics.

Soon:

ISPs: “We fired all our junior Cybersecurity employees and replaced them with AI.”

Bubsy: “What could pawssibly go wrong?”

If European companies didn’t already have good reasons to pull their data of US data centers, they sure as fuck do now.

That moment when you realize you’re not in !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone and people are talking about an entirely different kind of top than you were thinking.

This is dope, though, I also thought top was just stuck in time.

Never believe that corporations ever cared about pesky things like human rights or that all human lives have value.

No, corporations started hiring and selling products to women, to people of color, to LGBTQ+ groups because it made them more money. They never cared about any of these groups at all or their rights. They just knew that not hiring the best workers from each group and not being willing to sell them products was leaving money on the table. They wanted that money more than they wanted to openly exhibit how racist, misogynist, and homophobic they are.

So really the decision here follows from that exact same logic. They hid behind neutrality while keeping the person who made them more money. As sad as it is to say, this is the same logic that got them to accept and sell products to these groups to begin with. In the end, it’s literally always been about money and nothing else. They hide behind lofty values as a PR move, and nothing else deeper than that. It’s always just been propaganda to increase profits.

The only color they care about is green.

You are in fact correct. UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is the modernized version of the very very old BIOS (Basic Input/Output System).

It brought a parade of improvements including the GPT (GUID [Global Unique Identifier] Parition Table) partition table replacing the old MBR (Master Boot Record) partition table.

No EFI environment detected?

Sounds like someone deleted the EFI partition maybe.

Or the machine is so old it still has a BIOS.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1436186

Rufus Pollock’s math agrees. I am so bummed he recently took this down from his personal website where it had been available for 15 years

Now it just resolves as a 404 not found:

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf

It happens anytime between a few seconds after the OS loads, to hours or days later.

That will tell you relatively quickly if it’s a hardware problem or a software problem.

I mean, potentially not that quickly if they have to wait days for it to happen. Good low-investment-of-personal-time-and-effort suggestion though.

the /var/log/ folder would be the best place to start.

1. When a random freeze occurs note the time. Try to be as accurate and close to the time it happened as you can, including day, hour, and minute.
         A. If possible, do this for multiple instances of this happening

2. Check various log files starting with syslog and look at the times noted above. Look for any relevant errors being thrown by the system at these times.

Agreed on that, it’s not the best solution, but for people who need access to computing and whose devices have aged out of other support, it’s pretty much the only option available.

I’m in the minority who thinks Linux isn’t for everyone and that people who approach computing from that standpoint should really stick with macOS or Windows. Linux gives you more freedom to be in control, but that freedom to be in control also demands more knowledge and involvement to be able to be in control. “With great power comes great responsibility” kind of thing.

For an analogy Windows is like being a passenger in a car with someone else driving, and Linux you’re in the drivers seat of the car. You simply are required to be aware and involved in driving more because you are in control, and that control requires knowledge. You don’t get to sit back and go “I don’t need to know what all this stuff does because I don’t want to.” Understanding how the pedals and steering wheel work is a requirement for driving, as is paying attention to what is going on around you on the road. As a passenger, you aren’t required to know or pay attention to as much because you’re not being given the freedom of control, you’re just along for the ride. Linux is giving you that freedom of control of being the driver, but you have to know a lot more to do it than you need to know just being a passenger (Windows).

I know everyone else thinks Linux is ready for the prime time and ready for regular users who don’t want to have to learn and just want something that works… but I personally don’t. Simply because Linux is a lot less guaranteed to “just work” than the other options.

It’s basic in the sense that Linux is always a work in progress and no matter how hard you try, you’re going to need it at some point.

When your system randomly turns on to a black screen and there is seemingly no way to log in, knowing how to switch to the command line and at bare minimum back up your settings and documents before you wipe and start over is pretty key. To be clear, I have been in that exact situation and even more confusing situations where the PC has basically become unusable but I was able to fix it via CLI.

Just imagine losing months or years of work because you don’t know that you can probably fix it all from command line and likely don’t even need to wipe your computer and start over if you can narrow down what is going wrong and remove it via the command line.

I dunno seems pretty important to me.

Graphics driver installation is pretty key on any system but AMD graphics systems.

For example if your parents want to watch any videos without them stuttering or being weird, whether Intel or Nvidia, they will need the non-free graphics drivers installed so it doesn’t run like shit.

To my knowledge nearly every AMD chipset already works out of the box on Linux.

At least a basic primer about finding your way around in Linux in command line, and where various configuration files live.

When shit goes wrong (and it likely will at some point) knowing how to dump to another tty and log in via the console and fix issues via command line is pretty key. This has saved my ass more times than I can count now.

Having trouble finding a CLI focused course, but this is a free course that covers a lot of basics:

https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/introduction-to-linux/

For sure, but like expecting average people to understand the more technical side of Linux right off the bat, expecting average people to even understand that is an option is, frankly, elitist. The vast majority of humans just don’t even fundamentally understand the difference between “Windows 10” and “Windows 10 LTSC” and we’re not heading into a future in which they will all suddenly turn around and become computer literate when a vast amount of the world is barely regular literate.

We have got to stop expecting so much from average people and do a better job helping them.

I know maybe that’s what you intended to do, but if I was an average person, I wouldn’t have had any clue what LTSC and IOT meant without a lot of filling me in. Just food for thought, we have to spoon-feed this stuff to a lot of people, and be kind to them when they struggle with it.