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On merchandising, I'm also annoyed how low quality the printing of official Tees us, especially considering that some of them are actually fun designs.

Honestly, it's tempting just to buy fanart tees instead - there's an awesome one of Shaxs doing his usual pottery with his iconic "Fighting Fascism is a Full Time Job" as the caption on TeePublic. I kind of want to message the person and ask if they could sell a sticker as well.

That's some Earl grey hot news.

Does the BIOS have a way to factory reset itself?

Could it be a Secure Boot issue? From what I can tell, this is roughly a late Windows 8.1 era machine, and I think Microsoft already required OEMs to have Secure Boot around this time; I have a 6th gen Intel laptop (don't know about 5th gen, which I think this laptop has) with TPM 1.2. Lots of laptops are big jerks about this, and sometimes you have to disable it at least until you allow non-Microsoft Keys.

Also, can you change the title of your post? I feel like it doesn't convey what you're actually asking and sort of scares people away from wanting to respond to you. Maybe something more like "Tablet Boots to Black Screen After Attempted Debian Install?"

I'm guessing that the 7 or 8.1/10 thing is probably to select between legacy BIOS CSM or UEFI. What is it set to right now? Maybe try playing with that.

I may have misconveyed my meaning. I wasn't necessarily arguing that systemd has no viable alternatives. I meant to say that where systemd doesn't work (embedded systems being a good example), chances are the lack of support won't be a burden for a reasonably skilled user.

Honestly, it's 2024, and as a result, this post gives me a bit of a chuckle. For most purposes, systemd has won, and honestly, I hardly even notice. (Granted, I have only used Linux during the systemd era.) If systemd actually interferes with one's needs on a technological (not just a vague philosophical) level, little stops them from seeking out a way to use another init system.

Has it gotten more difficult to use other init systems these days? Yes. However, by the time a person has a problem where systemd can't do the job and have to use a different init system, they're probably more than competent enough to create custom services. I also feel like in terms of software support, only the most idiotic, worthless projects have no possible way to port hem to another init system.

I'm pretty sure some basic stuff is running on the Windows Dev Kit 2023 (no thanks to Qualcomm), which is very similar. See https://www.phoronix.com/news/Windows-Dev-Kit-2023-Linux

I wonder if the endgame for getting Linux running on these freakasauruses is not to create a custom UEFI firmware for each laptop that could abstract away the differences between each laptop with an ACPI API, rather that modifying the kernel itself.

It sounds daunting, but people have done it for the Raspberry Pi before. I don't think it runs as actual firmware on the device - I think it's just an ARM binary that could then execute and provide abstraction for a bootloader.

There are difficulties with that, obviously. For one, the Raspberry Pi is one hardware platform, and a Broadcom-based one at that. Still, I can't imagine that you'd have to redo everything from scratch on every platform; it'd basically just be something like a device tree to define the ACPI info built into every firmware build variant. If this idea worked, people could just have an environment to install an operating system on that is almost like a normal UEFI PC but with ARM.

Truth be told though, I kind of wish Ampere would get more into the consumer space; I feel like they have the least insane configuration of almost any ARM device, being users of UEFI. I don't know if they could viably scale down from their 192 core beasts, though. Now that BNL song is going through my head. "If I had a million dollars, I'd buy an Ampere workstation; a power-hungry ARM beast."

Honestly, no. I just use direct apt commands on my Debian installs for native stuff, assuming I even use the shell for that; sometimes, if it's not a complex update that's going to hold back 1.0*10^6^ packages, I just use Synaptic or Package Updater, frankly, as one of those is what I have my XFCE Package Update Indicator set to use on any machine I use frequently and it's convenient sometimes.

As for Flatpaks, I just run the flatpak update command whenever I feel bored. I wish Warehouse GUI supported updating, just because I find it really weird that's excluded from an otherwise pretty slick application that gets rid of me having to muck through the Flathub.

I don't write Rust code at the moment, and as for Python, I'm either using the Debian version of Python packages or scattered venvs that follow a de facto standard for Python developers: "What's an update?"

True; as said, this is Debian Testing. By "major issue", I mean Grub occasionally gets borked and I have to chroot in and fix it, or the time_t_64 transition.

I found the compromise between stability and newer packages acceptable for my desktop machine, which I am usually only on when I would actually have the time to debug these things. However, these days, I'm busy, thus may switch to stable in the next few months.

Having used the same Testing install since early 2022, I'd say it's not too bad. Stability-wise, I only have a major problem once a year.

Eventually, you get tired of having to switch to Flatpaks while packages transition. I'll either stay on Trixie when it goes to stable or reinstall. It's still an ext4 system and I want something different, as stable as ext4 is. I've been using btrfs on my new laptop for about a month and have been happy.

Honestly, in the age of Flatpaks, stable Debian is fine for most people in my opinion.

I guess also, for Badgey facial expressions, I got some practice when I attempted to design a Lego Badgey figure (in addition to all of the Cerritos crew, most of which are fine except for Rutherford is really hard and so is T'Ana. Also, I need to fix up Billups's face. I did like how Shax's face turned out, though, even though he still needs a bit of work.)