If you don’t have an Intel CPU, then you shouldn’t need it. At least, I think it’s only for CPUs and not for other intel-based devices (NIC, graphics, whatever).

It’s prompting for upgrade because it’s already installed. It’s recommended (but not required) by initramfs-tools, so that’s probably why it’s installed (recommended packages are installed by default). oops, read that wrong. Intel-microcode recommends initramfs-tools.

You may want to run

apt-rdepends intel-microcode 

to see what pulled it in.

But you should be able to uninstall it, and then it won’t prompt you any more.

This pic made me smile.

I haven’t been to DebConf since before COVID, but I definitely recognize a few people in that pic.

I’ve been using Debian since 2000 (potato).

I’ve occasionally had to use other distros for work (Red Hat or Ubuntu, typically), or to verify/troubleshoot bugs reports in upstream packages.

But my preference is Debian all the way, for servers or workstations.

It’s stable, and it has a great community. Also ideologically speaking, it has the Debian Social Contract and Debian Free Software Guidelines.

Ah, ok. I guess I misunderstood.

I’m afraid I don’t have any other suggestions that haven’t already been made elsewhere in the thread.

Best of luck, and I hope you get it figured out.

Shot in the dark here…

You said that blacklisting the module brought back your device, but not the sound. Is it possible that pulse is selecting the dummy as the default interface?

Before reloading alsa and restarting pulse - If you go into pavucontrol and change the input/output devices to your sound card, does the sound start working?

If that’s the case, then you should be able to edit your pulse config to force your audio device to be default, regardless of whether or not the dummy is present.

(No idea about the dummy device, sorry)

In 1998, the young lady working the cash register at the taco bell near where I worked told me I have really pretty eyes. So I have that going for me, which is nice.

The issue is that there are numerous posts instigating and encouraging everyone to defederate.

Why do you think that is?

Hint: It’s not because people are against federation with new instances.

Anyone who has an issue can reach out to me and I can address their concerns.

Is that reasonable?

No. People have told you repeatedly what the main issues are. If you want people to stop criticizing, then perhaps you should actually listen to them.

I have sort of had enough of copy and pasting commands I find on the internet without having a good understanding of how they actually work.

One thing you could do is start trying to understand those commands.

Read the man pages or the documentation to figure out what the commands are actually doing. Once you have the “what” , you can dig deeper to get to the “why” if it isn’t obvious by that point.

After enough of that, you’ll go to copy/paste and already understand what it’s doing without needing to look it up again.

Then from there, it’s a matter of building the instinct to be able to say “I need to do X, so I’ll use commands Y and Z.”

We absolutely do care about community.

You can say that all you want, but actions speak louder than words.

Because we are not lemmy based, so our development takes time (plus my developer left, plus we were trying to move to sublinks which itself has federation issues). So federation for us is not a config setting.

You launched what you apparently considered to be your MVP, and it’s a one-way leech of fediverse user content.

The fact that you were willing to launch without federation in place signals, at least to me, that you care far less about community participation than you do about the content the community produces.

Additionally, different admins feel different rules are fair, so it is hard for us to know how to be good community members.

Welcome to the fediverse, where every software stack works a little differently, and every server has its own rules.

I request a common set of rules, preferably based on traffic, so any newbie can get the breathing room to develop and participate. Does that sound fair?

You’re asking for someone to give you a set of common rules across all instances? For unpaid users and/or volunteer admins to spend their time compiling this information just to provide it to you?

No, actually. To me that doesn’t sound fair at all.

I’ve been around the block a few times, so maybe I’m just jaded.

My take is that it’s a proprietary platform, siphoning user data/content to redisplay and monetize.

Additionally, my gut feeling is that they don’t care about the community at all, and are just trying to leverage it to make money. They want to be the next reddit, and think the fediverse is their ticket. And I don’t think anything I’ve seen so far indicates otherwise.

We block Threads, and I think we should block this, too, immediately. If, in the future, the situation changes and they actually “give and take” rather than just “take” , then it should be simple enough to refederate.

My 2c.

Debian is on a roughly 2 year release cycle, and typically has a 6 month (-ish) freeze leading up to the release. So software in the stable release will generally be somewhere between 6 months and 2 years out of date. (My math might be a bit off but hopefully you get the idea).

Ultimately, it comes down to how you use your system, and what you need/want from your software. What you consider to be “the things that matter” will really be the deciding factor here. Need the occasional newer version of an application or library? It’s probably fine. Need the latest, greatest desktop environment? You may want to pass.

There are a number of ways to install newer versions. Backports, if it has what you want, is the easiest and safest.

There are other ways as well, but depending on what method you choose and what software it is, you may need to be careful not to break something. (I’d recommend not adding random third-party deb repositories for this reason).

Flatpak seems reasonable, but I haven’t used it much (once or twice I think). I typically use backports, or occasionally do my own local backports from sid.

Snap and AppImage are also possibilities. I don’t use snap, and I think I installed something proprietary by AppImage exactly once.

If it’s not in Debian at all, then I need to handle that a bit differently. But to me that’s a different issue than the ‘old version’ issue that Debian is often derided for.

Anecdotally, I’ve been daily-driving Debian stable (including for gaming) for over 20 years, and it suits my needs well. But of course, YMMV.

I don’t have an alternative program to suggest, but there are some workarounds for using redshift.

First, in the config file, you can set the location provider to manual, then specify a lat/lon and it will use that location in its time calculations. I do this on my laptop, and it works well except for when I cross multiple timezones - things are obviously off a bit.

Second, with the caveat that I haven’t tried this, it looks like you can also manually set dawn/dusk times in the config, which sounds like what you’re after.

See man 1 redshift for more info.