After my improbable love story with the MacBook Pro M1 I have descended further into madness. Awed by the ARM architecture of the MacBook Pro, I decided that I needed to get my paws on one of those new Windows ARM-based Copilot+ PCs. Being a longtime fan of Dell’s XPS product series, I bought the XPS 13 9345 Snapdragon® X Elite X1E-80-100.

For reasons that currently escape me, I bought a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro during a black Friday sale back in 2021. After feeling somewhat discouraged with the latest offerings in the Enterprise Linux world, I decided it was time to unwrap the MacBook and have a closer look at macOS. Now, six months later, I thought it would be fun to look back on this journey and maybe get an answer to the dreaded question: Is macOS better than Linux?

After logging into my Hetzner account, I was met with a message informing me that my current cloud server plan was being deprecated. I could either choose to keep my existing server plan or rescale it. In my experience, this approach is usually a disguised upsell attempt, but thankfully not so with Hetzner.

Finding a solid and reliable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) that you can trust is not a task to be taken lightly. For iOS, my choice has been the open-source application Raivo OTP. However, after yesterday’s automatic update, I no longer have my OTPs.

After my recent rant about Enterprise Linux, the company where I work became a SUSE Linux partner. Therefore, I’m giving Enterprise Linux another go. After initially looking at SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), I decided to go with SUSE’s rolling offering, Tumbleweed.

The Nginx mainline branch (currently version 1.25.3) has implemented support for HTTP/3 and I want it on my server. The first order of business will be to switch from the nginx stable branch (currently version 1.24.0) to the mainline branch. As Arch Linux provides both Nginx branches in their repository, it’s just a matter of performing a quick drop-in replacement.

I temporarily return to Fedora and am welcomed back by more breakage. The first thing I did after updating and restarting my Fedora laptop was to fire up the Cider app to connect to Apple Music. It immediately croaked with its dying words being Skia shader compilation error. That felt eerily familiar, as I remember facing the same problem on Fedora a few months back.

This is not another post about the never happening “Year of the Linux desktop”. I’ve been running GNU/Linux on my desktop for more than 20 years without ever believing the grass was greener on the other side. However, three years ago, I reluctantly replaced my Slackware Linux installations with the offerings from Linux Enterprise providers Canonical and Red Hat.

Since the end of last year, most of my backlinks have originated from websites without any relevant connection to my content. However, they’re suspiciously similar, identified by the suffix of the referring URL being -k.html. Another distinct feature of the backlinks is that they’re only targeting (as in hotlinking) images.

Earlier this year, Canonical decided to advertise the arrival of Ubuntu Pro by hooking up the following message in the terminal as users were issuing apt update: “The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled: (list of vulnerable installed packages)”. Predictable for anyone but Canonical, confusion ensued.

During an issue with a defective storage solution, I had temporarily (as in not added to fstab) mounted an external USB disk under /mnt/usb-disk on a Proxmox server to keep the backups flowing. A day and a reboot later, those backups started to fill up the local storage instead with unfortunate consequences. As they say, you really can’t fix stupid.

A few years ago I speculated in the article “Slackware Linux trivia, history, and things you didn’t know” that slackware.com was being hosted on Slackware Linux 12.0. My assumption was based on the host headers returned from the server. Those headers reveal that the webserver is Apache/2.2.22, coincidentally the last Apache patch ever released for Slackware 12.0. However, it turns out that I was very wrong.

My Dell XPS 15 9570 laptop is currently running the Fedora Linux distribution and receives firmware updates automatically from the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). So far so good, but I recently became aware that the same firmware version is not provided on Dell’s drivers and downloads page.

For a while now, my IPFS node has complained about resource limits being exceeded. Sadly, I’ve not had any time to look into the issue. Speaking of, what kind of miserable bastard would spend their Christmas holiday troubleshooting an IPFS node? Ah yes, that would be me.

The conclusion of last week’s thrilling story about cryptocurrency scammers and service providers. Who did come to the aid of Joe Nobody, and who conveniently turned a blind eye to my abuse reports. Welcome to the good, the bad, and Namecheap.