Gnome on passthejoe

GNOME Software was pretty much freezing in Debian 12. Here's how I fixed it

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 03:45:00 -0800

My 2011 iMac 27-inch running Debian 12 (upgraded since 10) was having an issue with GNOME Software. The app would start, but it would “spin” forever, never allowing me to add, remove or update software.

A quick search produced this fix, which worked immediately:

To fix Gnome Software getting stuck with “Software catalog is being loaded” being shown, kill the application and remove its cache using these two commands:

$ killall gnome-software
$ rm -rf ~/.cache/gnome-software

Then restart GNOME Software. It works!

I love a quiet laptop

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 13:02:19 -0700

I love a quiet computer. That’s one of the great appeals of the Raspberry Pi. No fans, no spinning drives. If only they had enough power to really do desktop things.

I’ve never experienced a Pi “bigger” than a Zero W version 1.1, so I don’t have enough information.

And like most people who still use “real” computers that aren’t smartphones, I do most of my computing on a laptop. And that laptop has an x86_64 (in my case Intel) processor.

Pausing the Linux rebuild

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 16:48:56 -0700

I was all ready to crack open the HP Envy 15 laptop this afternoon, pull the 250 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and replace it with a 1 TB model. While in there, I planned to replace the battery, which has a dead cell.

But I decided to press “pause.”

I started running Linux on this particular laptop in 2019 (??) with Debian Stable (then Buster), replacing it with Testing (Bullseye) maybe a couple of months ago.

Debian 10 Buster with GNOME 3: I didn't expect it to be this fast, but that could be the SSD talking

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 13:30:00 -0700

I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it.

And this is with GNOME 3. The stock or lightly/heavily-favored desktop environment in Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu looks great, runs with no hesitation (in constrast to Windows 10) and doesn’t have me thinking that I need anything else for speed-related reasons.