It’s The Year Of Linux On The Laptop

So Firefox freaked out so violently at some kind of… security thing on a web site that it flooded the desktop with events that the laptop was unusable.

Cool cool

So I rebooted, and:

OH MY GOD! First of all, that screen is so dusty! Second of all… when rebooting, Debian now kicks in something called “packagekit”!? And it… basically does an apt upgrade; apt install… WHEN REBOOTING!?

So I have to sit here waiting — for twenty minutes — while it’s downloading packages and installing them?

Finally Linux has reached parity with Microsoft Windows and Macos: Instead of running the updates in the background, like Linux has been doing for decades, it’s now requiring users to sit and stare at it while it’s upgrading.

Not only that, it’s doing this at the absolute worst time possible — when you’re rebooting. The only reason you’re rebooting is because something bad happened, and that’s not when you want to upgrade your fucking OS! You want to get back to what you were doing!

It’s mind boggling. Who came up with this idea?

Anyway, the solution seems to be to say:

apt remove packagekit

Even though it’s saying:

That sounds serious! But apparently it isn’t? At least the laptop seems to work fine after removing those.

Remember to remove packagegit whenever you install Debian these days.

Cherry on the cake: It updated some kind of firmware so that my 5G modem no longer works. Thanks!

[Edit: Later this day.]

I was wondering whether this was a misconfiguration on my laptop or something… But I had to reboot a display machine just now, and:

Yup. 15 minutes of updating. And that’s a machine that should never, ever require any updates, and the hardware is kinda weird, so I was going “eek”, but it came back up again after the update.

Book Club 2025: L’été 80 by Marguerite Duras

I apparently picked this up at a sale in 2021. I quite enjoy Duras’ books, but I’ve only read a handful. I think I’ve seen most of her hit movies, though.

This book is quite short, and you have to admire the lengths they’ve gone to to make this into something that can be sold as “a book” — French flaps, sturdy paper, small pages, large margins.

Anyway, this is a collection of texts that Duras wrote for Libération in the summer of 1980. Her method seems to be to look at what happened the last week, and then write about that en passant, in a way that doesn’t make much sense to somebody that doesn’t know what she’s talking about. And then she mixes it with (I’m guessing) what she’s seeing out the windows, as her house is apparently by the beach, so there’s people running around, and there’s this boy, David, who tells her about a shark and stuff.

It’s nifty! A really enjoyable read.

I particularly liked the bit where she calls, er, directory assistance I guess it’s called? in the middle of the night to talk about Gdansk, because she wanted to talk to somebody about Gdansk. I can just picture it — I’ve listened to a few interviews with her…

Sommeren 80 (1980) by Marguerite Duras (buy used, 3.51 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: The Luck of the Bodkins by P. G. Wodehouse

I was feeling both under the weather and down in the dumps, so I reached for a Wodehouse book.

And this one, from 1935, is top notch. This ticks along like extremely complicated clockwork in an almost hypnotic manner. There’s three (3) romances that have to come true, and there’s also a pearl necklace to be smuggled. Naturally Wodehouse goes through all permutations possible for various catastrophes, and it’s all very, very amusing.

It may also be Wodehouse’s longest novel? I’m not sure, but at 360 pages, it’s up there, at least. And I’m not surprised at all that Wodehouse cut it down for US release, because it’s perhaps, er, more than is advised for this kind of thing. It’s not boring for a single moment, but at the same time, you can’t help thinking “well, OK, OK” at the nineteenth plot twist/complication.

But you can’t really blame Wodehouse for not limiting himself when he’s got a good thing going.

The Luck of the Bodkins (1935) by P. G. Wodehouse (buy used, 4.06 on Goodreads)