Kernel Updates Postponed

     It was fortunate that kernel upgrades were delayed as I had installed it on my workstation, and the “fixes” broke the kernel much worse than it was.  It had the potential to do something wrong, so far unrealized on the servers, but the current release is taking kernel oopses on a regular basis, so much worse.

     And Ubuntu, which I’ve been using since 2012, has become way too Microsofty now, just like Redhat before them and really twisted my arm into changing distros again, at least in my work station, but there is no one distro that really does everything I need, so instead of being dual-boot my workstation is going to become triple boot with Win10, Debian, and Manjaro with Manjaro being my daily driver, but Debian for those cases where I need to run commercial software such as Anydesk which is not available for Manjaro because Manjaro builds pretty much everything from source.

     The things Ubuntu has done recently is screwed up the libs such that I can’t have 32 bit version of Wine peacefully co-exist with virtual machines, and I can’t have anything gtk3 peacefully co-exist with the rest of the system because they’ve gone to distributing libgtk3 with snap and they are sending a version that does not match what most of the other software was compiled under so I’m getting LD failed to preload libgtk3 missing symbol errors left and right.  I don’t like snaps, they are slow as snails, totally insecure, and often unreliable, and they in most cases include their own libs and containerize things which neither have a reason to be containerized nor work well in that environment.

     And to add insult to injury, the most recent firefox they distributed, version 100, is not configured the way I like and when I tried to fix that I got a “Managed by Canonical”, which is Ubuntu’s parent company and it did not let me.  Well if I wanted that I’d run Windows as my daily driver, NO THANK YOU.  So I’m going to be mostly tied up Sunday arranging my machine correctly and kernel upgrades will wait until the next point release and then only after I’ve had a few days to be sure they’ve corrected whatever they broke in 5.17.11, perhaps 5.18.1 will be out and fix the compile problems I found in 5.18 that I did file a bugzilla report on, and in the meantime I will also file a report on the kernel oopses in 5.17.11 to make sure they are aware of them.

     I built version 102 of Firefox from source today and unfortunately it has a nasty bug where it will not save the default profile.