If you pay ten bucks you can get a vps with a few gigs of space for a year and just put your kilobyte of config files there. If you don’t want the malicious vps admin to crawl it you can encrypt a zip of them.

It costs ten bucks but you get an offsite storage vault with a public ip and in some scenarios that’s desirable.

This is what MIT license defenders have to deploy to mimic a fraction of our power.

Yeah the technology existed forever but it wasn’t until a developer didn’t have to target the floppy disk or cd rom or even really pay for hosting at all in most cases that it took off.

I am also not excited for the year of the linux desktop. It’s genuinely gonna suck.

People used to use alsa directly (he’ll, I used to use oss directly).

When pulseaudio came along it broke a bunch of stuff and had a lot of problems but there was massive institutional pressure to adopt it because everyone wanted a unified framework.

Pipewire provides that framework and doesn’t break like pulse did. Admittedly pulse has gotten better but still sucks to interact with.

I made that statement right after suggesting the op stick with the x11 plasma branch until a maintained fork appears.

It’s not exactly a one to one comparison.

Idk how long you’ve been around linux. Theres another old timer itt who brings up some of the things i will.

People get popular support for saying Linus is a jerk. I never met the guy so idk. When I look back on decades of using the operating system with many components failing to be maintained because their creators couldn’t keep going, their lives changed or they simply lost interest, soulless grifters like poettering ruining the experience for the rest of us and the community in general struggling to stay afloat in the waves and eddies created by the motion of massive multinationals and governments swimming beneath our feet, I understand his behavior.

Wayland is another in a long line of rushed rollouts that don’t consider your use case because it’s not for you.

I truly hope someone picks up maintaining and patching plasma, but if it’s anything like past times, consider sticking with the old branch. If that seems like a dead end, maybe switch to a distribution with lts versioning.

Remember how many people stuck with alsa until pipewire came along.

The year of the linux desktop is gonna be a rough one.

The reason I asked that is 3.5” drives can’t operate from usb bus 5v like 2.5” ones can and you didnt specify.

Have you tried hot plugging the drive into the dock while it’s plugged into the computer? If the usb sata controller is slow on the uptake it might miss the relatively narrow chance to report to the pc what’s going on.

Don’t worry about damaging your drives doing that btw, it’s extremely unlikely that you have a disk whose firmware doesn’t support it and all sata ports support it electrically.

As an addendum: is the drive even good? Do you have a known functional disk to test with?

E: oh yeah, on the off chance that the disk is uninitialized get everything plugged up and do an lsblk to show the various block devices. Sometimes if I plug up a disk with no partition table or superblock or whatever gpt uses nothing happens but lsblk shows it and I can mess with it.

Do you have it plugged into the wall?

In the ops defense, they’re probably not accounting for their labor and calling anything in between cost+parts and sale price “profit”.

Eh, gnome is the default on some of the biggest distributions in a time when apparently lots of people are trying Linux for the first time so there’s an outsized opportunity for their usual shenanigans to have consequences for the rest of us.

Which has happened a bunch of times in the past.

Historically speaking, the gnome devs have made “disabled by default” the first step towards removing a feature everyone uses.

Do journalctl and look at what’s happening.

The uhh a16 I think is four gpu card intended for remote working that would be a natural fit to this. Except that it has no outputs.

You can do what you’re asking about in x, but I don’t think in Wayland.

Making something not the default then removing it because it isn’t widely used (because it’s now disabled by default and users have to know it exists and then turn it on) is the gnome way.

Make no mistake, they’re trying to remove features they don’t like. There are lots of people involved in free software because they didn’t get to be in control of nonfree software.

Grimly: “year of the linux desktop”

You need an sd card adapter that lets you read and write the sd card from your pc to put an image the pi can boot onto the sd card.

You will need this anyway when you eventually run into the sd card having a bunch of of bad blocks or unreadable sectors.

It will work ”fine” for what you’re describing but consider getting one of those sata/m2 adapter boards so your root filesystem isn’t based on the media explicitly designed for temporarily holding information until the user can get back to a computer.

If you already have a computer, just set up a vm.

Since you dont know what’s happening you dont need to be fucking around with busybox. Boot back into your usb install environment (was it the live system or netinst?) and see how fstab looks. Pasting it would be silly but I bet you can take a picture with your phone and post it itt.

What you’re looking for is drives mounted by dynamic device identifiers as opposed to uuids.

Like the other user said, you never know how quick a drive will report itself to the uefi and drives with big cache like ssds can have hundreds of operations in their queue before “say hi to the nice motherboard”.

If it turns out that your fstab is all fucked up, use ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid to show you what th uuids are and fix your fstab on the system then reboot.

Perhaps it’s the misty air of memory, but I truly hope this new driver is as good as the 20 year old one we used to use…

Thanks for the informative and detailed answer! I’ve only ever installed and used arch for fun so the finer points of how pacman handles manually installed packages never came up.

You said mostly safe, what kinds of issues can doing what you just described cause? You said pinning it through pacman would be an unsupported partial upgrade, even though that would give the package manager visibility on what you’re trying to do it would result in types of dependency resolution that aren’t supported or tested for I imagine?

Yeah I didn’t want to make the bold and refreshing assertion that arch isnt appropriate for situations where gracefully handling an old package is a requirement but that was my initial read on the situation.