When my 2011 MacBook Air started crashing its entire desktop every time a new app launched, the obvious suspect was the app. Three wrong theories later, journalctl, coredumpctl and one stack trace led to a confirmed upstream Mesa bug — and a one-line workaround. A practical tour of Linux crash forensics: the tools, the reading skills, and the discipline of letting evidence outrank a good story.
A dead battery held an old Chromebook hostage, a $14 replacement brought it back — and now runs the machine for hours while insisting it doesn’t exist. A tale of brownout loops, battery part numbers, deep-sleep protection, and learning to love a mute fuel gauge.
Google declared this 2017 education Chromebook e-waste. The C128 test disagreed. A full walkthrough of the MrChromebox UEFI conversion and Fedora 44 KDE install — enterprise enrollment checks, the write-protect screw hunt, and the surprises waiting in System Settings.
An always-on home server doesn’t have to be always on. With rtcwake and a systemd timer, my old Samsung Q330 now sleeps fourteen hours a day and wakes itself up on schedule – using hardware that’s been on every motherboard for decades.
A PowerShell script that ran fine 30 minutes ago suddenly “cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled”? You probably didn’t change anything — you changed terminals. VS Code has two nearly identical PowerShell consoles, and only one of them obeys the execution policy.
Installing Visual Studio Code from Microsoft’s RPM works fine on Fedora, but updates often don’t: the in-app Update button just opens a download page. Here’s how to register Microsoft’s repository properly so DNF handles VS Code updates alongside everything else.
My ThinkPad P15 crashed on resume from sleep — a NULL pointer dereference in the NVIDIA 610.4x driver on Ampere mobile GPUs. The fix turned out to be a driver update and patience, but the real lesson is the testing discipline: baseline before mitigation, one variable at a time.
Installing NVIDIA drivers on Linux used to leave mental scars. Today it’s two dnf commands, one compile, and a blue screen most guides never mention. Here’s the full process on Fedora 44 with Secure Boot enabled — including every trap in the MOK enrollment ceremony.
