- entry 2025/05/14

What now, Linux?

Only, upon the next reboot a whinge popped up saying that the keychain had not been unlocked at startup (as was supposed to happen given that I have set to log in automatically). It seems half the internet thinks this is a known bug, and the other half thinks that all you need to do is to give Seahorse (the app that deals with passwords) your login password and it'll be okay. It wasn't. I was prompted to enter the password at startup - or press Esc a bunch of times until it goes away (but then it won't be unlocked so no calendar).

Now, maybe a Linux wizard could do some fancy mojo like rearranging the order and times in which things load, but I'm not that wizard. I took a different approach and just blanked the password and ignored the dire warnings about security. After all, if I cared about security on this machine then I'd have a login password and an encrypted partition.

Coming up to Eurovision night, I found that xed (the Linux Mint editor) would randomly forget the HTML colourisation until I told it to colourise as something else then switched back. I looked at gedit, the Gnome editor, and it looked like a more complete version of xed with colourisation that worked, and autosave that I wanted but... didn't appear to work.

Gedit worked well all through the contest and everything I wanted to write. It even highlighted words I spelled wrongly on the fly...once I had changed it to use British (proper) English and then changed the system language settings to match so it would happen automatically next time.
The file was uploaded to my site, and then it was time to shut down because it was way past my bedtime.

Oh, FFS.

Yup. It looks like init tried to kill itself and the kernel threw a wobbly. What?

I restarted and shut down again. I noticed that I saw the message about the machine is going down NOW pop up in the upper left of the screen for a moment. Why? That's a text mode thing, that shouldn't be appearing in the UI. What normally happens when I choose to shutdown or reboot is nothing for a few seconds, until the desktop is replaced by the startup logo, and after a little bit longer the system either restarts or powers off. Only, it didn't want to do that any more.

Now, I could have written a lot about the horribly flawed software installation process - you should not need to give the password to grant root access to the installer just to install an application. There should be a machine-wide mechanism (to install for everybody, not just the current user) that is distinct from root - so there can be a clear distinction between doing stuff to the kernel (like sudo apt install alsa-base) rather than installing userland stuff (like sudo apt install gedit).
But I'm not going to go on too much about this as I have restarted and power cycled a bunch of times this afternoon and, well, it worked. How? Why?

I really want to like Linux as even on this old machine it seems reasonably nice, even using the latest 'full fat' version (can this machine even manage Windows 11?) but it seems very fragile. Oh, and that's not mentioning all the weird bugs.
I would like to use Timeshift to back up the important system files and settings so if something gets messed up then I could revert. Unfortunately it appears as if to Linux everything that isn't in the user's home directory is "important". I aborted when it said it wanted several more gigabytes than I have available in order to back up some eighty thousand files...

Still, that being said, I'm writing this in gedit.

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