Meadow

What a sad previous entry. The hinges have many times again erred but it is being held together by tape, satisfactorily enough. I have dropped this laptop at least once now leaving a dent on its shell, and it's getting uglier every day. The screen covered in dust and grime that I mistake for stray pixels sometimes. There is no replacing this thing until 2028—that is the goal.

Haha. After two years of being on Ultramarine, I now return to Debian. I've been on a version of Ultramarine that's based on Fedora 42 for too long. Fedora 42 reached its end-of-life I think May of this year, and the latest UM version right now is 44. I neglected updating or upgrading my system that the upgrade script just didn't work anymore or something. I couldn't trace the issue is (it seems it could be a mesa package issue instead of an Ultramarine issue) but I was not getting any more help from the Ultramarine people and opening an issue thread in the big boy Redhat forums or whereever and trying to get the experts over there to understand that I'm just a little ol' impatient desktop user so that they don't use such big words on me was too much effort. In retrospect this was a months-spanning task that I was too lazy to deal with head on. My two options were to either upgrade from 42 to 44 or reinstall my system; personally hoping for the former to work since I did not want to go through the trouble of backing up my files on a terribly slow and limited 64 GB flashdrive. I even ended up removing certain video codec packages and even my file explorer which apparently had conflicts with the upgrade, LoL. At that point I was literally tearing off parts of my normal functioning system hoping that as long as I get the upgrade to work, I'd be able to fix it later, but alas.

Recently Meel bought me a copy of Gmod on Steam so we can play Shinri Trial together with friends but I wasn't able to launch Gmod on sunflower (my UM laptop). I wasn't sure why but somehow I was convinced it was the entire operating system at fault; clearly an overreaction but nevertheless the cause of a great return trip to Debian. Backup, install and setup took like the entire day, and in the end I was able to launch Gmod by using the 64-bit architecture beta or whatever and by using the Proton Experimental compatibility layer. So maybe I didn't have to reinstall my system at all, but I'm fine with it because it's long overdue. I did lose all my Minecraft worlds except for my most important one simply because I forgot, so.

The hostname has changed from sunflower to meadow to give it a new identity. But the sunflower desktop is retained; I don't want to look for another wallpaper.

I was considering switching to Ubuntu LTS 26.04 for a newer GNOME version but I don't know about the enterprise stuff. Since my laptop only has one SSD slot and new NVMe stuff is too expensive, I have to try to keep my system minimal. I set separate partitions for its / and /home directories to reduce chances of total data loss because of insufficient backups in case I ever have to reinstall or distrohop again, albeit both events being highly unlikely given that I'm back on Debian. I couldn't be assed to update my system consistently.

I think the right corner issue is finally manifesting into something scarier now. There's a crack on the laptop's back/bottom panel and a bend crease where the tightness is. I fear that the hinge came loose again to the point where we would need a replacement cover.

I have to open it again to check the insides, but I've been delaying it. I have opened it before for cleaning so this will be the second time. I plan to clean the fan and replace the thermal paste and check while I'm at it, but I have yet to buy the cleaning stuff I need like a can of air and new thermal paste. I missed the sale so I'm waiting before purchasing anything. Until then I'll just be careful and hope the laptop doesn't get any worse.

My webcam isn't working anymore either... We replaced the top panel of the screen which included the camera. I hope the camera isn't dead and instead something is just misaligned inside. The last picture I took with the webcam seems to be taken on July 27, 2025, so the repair guy probably didn't replace it with anything faulty.

It's not built to but I want this laptop to really last.