“Sons of Texas” reminded me of this tune I enjoyed a while back from Maylene and the Sons of Disaster:

“Step Up (I’m On It)”

AAA’s seem really common in my neck of the woods.

I got a Coast headlamp a couple years back that has a rechargeable battery pack, but can also take regular AAA’s, which is a handy feature if I happen to need an immediate recharge.

Ah, darn. Unfortunately I have no additional help to offer since that particular issue was fixed for me after changing those options in Flatseal.

I’d try running Firefox from the terminal to see what error message you’re receiving when the crashes occur; the unique error message was what led me to this workaround when I was originally troubleshooting.

In Bazzite, you should just need to open the Discover package manager and click “Refresh” and then “Update All” in the top right. Although these drivers don’t appear to be available through the package manager yet; mine is still on version 560.31.02.

If your Firefox crashes are anything like mine were, it should be solved by opening up Flatseal and disabling Wayland rendering for Firefox. See the screenshot shown here: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/nvidia-555-drivers-incoming-important-information/2554

When I first installed Bazzite on my Intel+Nvidia laptop, the Firefox crashes were constant. The workaround here fixed the issue for me.

Ohh, I’m dumb

Any immutable distro, Debian, Ubuntu, all their derivatives

Debian and Ubuntu are not immutable distributions by default, unless I am mistaken.

I’m no legal expert; I assume support can be either offered or completely avoided depending on the shop owner’s preference. Most Linux distributions come with a “this software is free (as in freedom) and comes with no warranty or guaranteed functionality” disclaimer.

If I wanted to engage more with my clients and build more trust, I might offer some degree of troubleshooting/support for the Linux machines I sold. But I don’t think I’d be under any legal obligation to offer that service just for selling the laptops.

Whether or not the computer shop offers support might affect whether or not a customer wants to shop at my store. Maybe I can sell my laptops cheaper if I don’t offer support, or maybe my laptops cost a bit more because I do offer aftermarket support.

how can Linux be a moderated product to sell for desktop

It kinda depends on each individuals’ use case; there’s lots of different Linux distributions that are better (or worse) for specific workloads.

Any given laptop I’m staring at in a store will probably work perfectly fine as a general-use machine with Linux Mint installed. This is my go-to distro when repurposing a machine because it works great out of the box. If I were running a computer store and wanted to sell consumer laptops with Linux on them, I’d default to Mint.

If someone is looking to turn their PC into something more specialized for gaming, they can look at something like Bazzite or Batocera. These will generally require some tinkering.

If an individual or company is looking to build an office with many workstations and user accounts, they might consider Red Hat Enterprise Linux so they can benefit from official support channels if something needs troubleshooting. Many computer labs at NCSU used RHEL when I attended many years ago.

Want a stable server environment? Debian is a standard pick.

Want a barebones system with no bells and whistles (but great battery life)? Alpine oughta work.

So Linux has many options for end users to pick from, which can be seen as a good thing (more options is generally good), but also a bad thing (many end users might consider the plethora of options to be overwhelming if they’ve never used Linux before).

Linux (or is called unix?)

Linux (Or GNU/Linux) operating systems are a modern implementation of an old research OS that was called “Unix”. Spiritual successors to Unix like Linux and BSD try to bring a lot of the design philosophies of Unix into modern OSes (I believe this is generally called the “POSIX” standard. e.g.: macOS is a POSIX compliant OS, iirc).

If I’ve gotten any of this information incorrect, please don’t tell Richard Stallman.

lol, I feel you there. I got a ruggedized, waterproof USB stick about 6 years ago to keep on my keychain and I’ve used it maybe three times ever. Though I’ve also been working from home for the last 4+ years so, y’know, less opportunities to use it in general.

Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, though.

6.06 “Dapper Drake” (iirc) was my first GNU/Linux distro back in the day. I was about 15 and spent a week tinkering with it trying to get the wifi to work on my old HP Pavilion.

Good times.

Yep! These guys are booked solid around the clock. I have to schedule well in advance any time I want to take my car to them, unless I want to camp out and be the first customer when they open at 5am. Worth it, though. They’re good people.

Nah, I just live in a rural area. There’s closer shops to me, but a very honest local business I’ve been going to for years is a bit further away and it’s worth the extra distance for their service. They’re a fantastic shop and they’ve always done great by me.

Adding on to this: the repair shop I take my car to is too far from my house for me to walk or bike back, so I just walk the shops in town while they work on my car (unless they tell me ahead of time it might take more than one day to diagnose+repair, in which case I ask a friend to drive me back home after dropping off the car).

It’s less that they “assume you can leave”, but rather that it isn’t really their problem. They need an uncertain amount of time to work on your car, depending on the issue being repaired, and you can leave if you want to during that window.

If there’s nowhere for you to walk/bike to nearby, you just gotta sit and wait, which I’ve done on a handful of occasions. Just sitting in the lobby and reading some outdated magazines for an hour or two. It’s boring, but what can you do?

I really enjoyed watching this series a while back by Ben Eater:

“Building an 8-bit Breadboard Computer”

It explains a lot of the steps in the rocks-to-computer pipeline in detail. It assumes decent familiarity with electronics fundamentals, though. So maybe not the best starting point.

A $1 backscratcher from a local pharmacy. Makes scratching my own back effortless. 10/10 investment. And way more affordable than the full-time backscratching assistant I was paying all those years.

I’m not a fan of going to the gym, either. Though I understand why others prefer it.

I’ve always liked having a home gym. I inherited a bunch of equipment from my parents when I was about 22, but had to sell it all when I moved into a much smaller living space when I was 25. I was only able recently, at 33, to invest in a new set of equipment and it’s been nice to get to do proper weightlifting at home again.