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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I’m using Linux for more than a decade (including Mint) and never had a hardware failure because of it, had 2 GPUs died on me because of power shortages though.

    Anyway, I believe those are more likely a coincidence because older they get it’s more likely they die because of age, especially for PSUs. And PSUs die almost without any indications. However 3 PC is a lot, but I would suspect unstable electricity before that.

    It’s also possible that motherboard is dead instead of PSU. And if they’re laptops, I think this is a better possibility. It’s easier to check if they are not laptops.












  • It is indeed a pain to use on Linux. We have a similar (maybe the same) Macbook Air and recently I had to deal with the same thing to make it usable. I have tried many different distros, and most of the time I had to install the broadcom-wl driver via phone-tethering. Installing or even using dkms version is not the only problem too, the driver is also awful. The distro I settled was LMDE, surprisingly it was the only distro that came with Broadcom drivers, which was a plus at first. However it deteriorated so fast as you described, I had to find a permanent solution. My solution was completely ditching broadcom-wl drivers in favour of Intel’s iwd driver.

    iwd also has performance issues time to time, but at least disabling/re-enabling it solves the issue, unlike had to restart the Macbook with broadcom-wl.

    I also tried to replace the Broadcom Wi-Fi module by opening the back cover of Macbook since I had a Wi-Fi card laying around, but sadly the one on Macbook was not a nowadays’ standard M2 unit, so couldn’t done it.


  • I see. Those indeed are not possible on Wayland, at least not the way that was on Xorg. KDE has a built-in tool like xprop but I don’t know if it can be used on its own other than running it via KDE settings (There is Detect window properties option under Window rules.)

    From my own experience, using global keys was quite a hassle. I have found some workarounds to some but it’s still an open issue for me. Wayland has changed how a lot things work and I believe there will be solutions or at least workarounds to all Xorg tools in time, maybe with something like Flatseal but for Wayland but main issue which is security remains, so I don’t know how things will go.