In the specs for the Laptop 13, it says:

Fingerprint Reader (2nd Gen)

Same for the 16, but not the 12.

Unfortunately, the former is not possible due to asinine requirements by the HDMI Forum: https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected The only option is to use DisplayPort instead (or perhaps an adapter).

I’ve created a small helper script to help me with this:

#!/bin/bash
USED_VER=$(uname -r)
echo "Kernel version in use: $USED_VER"

echo "Other installed versions:"
dpkg --list 'linux-image*' | grep ^ii | grep -v $USED_VER

echo "Remove unneeded packages above using the following command:"
echo "sudo apt remove linux-image-VERSION"

It prints a list of the installed kernels (excl. the running one) and prints the command to uninstall the packages (it doesn’t remove anything by itself).

That sounds pretty bad and probably means other things are broken too. The easiest option would probably be a reinstall at this point, but if you want to learn something you can also try to salvage your install.

To recover, it’s probably easiest to manually configure your Ethernet connection as described by InnerScientist and then re-install the network-manager package.

You can check the status of the network-manager package using dpgk. It should look like this (ii at the start, but it sounds like it’s not installed in your case):

$ dpkg -l | grep -i network-manager
ii  network-manager                         1.52.1-1                        amd64        network management framework (daemon and userspace tools)
ii  network-manager-l10n                    1.52.1-1                        all          network management framework (translation files)

You can also check /var/log/apt/history.log to see what went wrong and if there are other things you need to fix.

I performed the upgrade in two steps apt upgrade --without-new-pkgs and apt full-upgrade (based on the release notes). I can see the following on the line Upgrade: for the command apt full-upgrade:

network-manager:amd64 (1.42.4-1+deb12u1, 1.52.1-1)

On the Remove: line you can see the packages that were removed. Unfortunately, the names of many libraries were changed in this release (e.g., libreadline8:amd64 to libreadline8t64:amd64), so there’s a lot of noise in there. Maybe you can look at that line and ignore everything that starts with lib to see if any other important packages were removed.

One thing that comes to mind is that the 50series is only supperted by the open version of the proprietary Nvidia drivers. The closed version doesn’t support your new GPU, but would work with your old GPU. Do you know which version you installed?

Plasma 6 is a significant upgrade for sure, especially on Wayland! I’d rate the crash frequency (on Fedora) at between once per week and once per month ;-)

Join the Debian Trixie upgrade fun today :) https://micronews.debian.org/

I’m running Ubuntu on a server. I’ve enabled the free Ubuntu Pro subscription to get ESM patches for the universe repository. Not sure if it really matters, but better safe than sorry.

The easiest distros to run Resolve would probably be Rocky Linux 8, Alma Linux 8 (both are based on RHEL 8). Instead of the EOL Rocky/Alma 8.6, you should use release 8.10 (8.6 would update to 8.10 anyway). However, while still currently “supported”, these are still shipping (mostly) 6-year-old (!) packages. Also, only a small number of packages is actively supported by Red Hat. IMO, this implies that these distros offer a lower level of security. The most critical parts (browser, kernel) are still well-supported, so the difference is probably not too large for most regular users. However, you may also struggle to run some other software (although Flatpaks are available). It’s unfortunate that Resolve only supports an ancient version of Rocky (Rocky 10 is now out)…

Read (only) access should be fine. What makes it complicated is if there can be writes from multiple locations. Basically, the simple version would be to just periodically copy the data from the primary to all secondary locations.

I can see why you’d want to go with an off-the-shelf NAS. But, I would carefully check if it supports your use case, as it’s quite advanced.

If the data only needs to be read & written from a single server (and the others are just backups), you can also use simpler replication instead of synchthing. E.g. syncoid or TrueNAS replication. It sounds like you should be able to do that with separate datasets per household in your usecase.

I would probably go with a simple approach like this:

• ZFS: Each house gets a “NAS” that provides a ZFS filesystem to store the data. This gives you the ability to share the drives across your use cases (you, rest of the family), snapshots, RAIDZ support, and usage quotas. For the OS, you could use what you prefer (TrueNAS, Debian, Ubuntu, …).
• Syncthing to synchronize the files across the servers/houses. This allows you to read and write data from anywhere and syncthing will mirror the writes to the other places. I use it to synchronize data across 5 devices and it works quite well.

There are probably more advanced (enterprise?) ways to handle the file synchronization. But, I think this hould be good enough for normal, personal use. The main disadvantage is that you’re only synchronizing the current data (excluding the ZFS snapshots). On the other hand, this also allows you to mix file systems if necessary.

Gnome and KDE are not doing the same thing.

KDE will continue to offer an X11 session for the time being:

Current status: Plasma’s X11 session continues to be maintained.

https://pointieststick.com/2025/06/21/about-plasmas-x11-session/

Gnome will disable the X11 session in the next release and then remove the code:

The most likely scenario is that all the X11 session code stays disabled by default for 49 with a planned removal for GNOME 50.

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/08/the-x11-session-removal/

I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to do here. Are you

1. Trying to create a new owncloud instance and put your data somewhere other than in /var, or
2. Try to move the data location of an existing owncloud instance?

If you’re trying to do the second one, there’s a useful guide on it here: https://omiid.me/notebook/25/move-docker-volume-to-bind-mount. The first one should be even simpler, you can just replace the volumes in the compose file by bind mounts (basically, just this step of the tutorial: https://omiid.me/notebook/25/move-docker-volume-to-bind-mount#modifying-docker-compose).

The Windows filesystem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS. Basically, don’t try to share the game drive with Windows.

If you have an AMD GPU (except for the very latest GPUs), you should be good out of the box. The AMD driver comes pre-installed with mesa.

Other than that… don’t use NTFS to store your games.

Edit: Maybe I misunderstood your question. I understood it as: What are some recommended changes to do after installing a Linux distro. Did you meant to ask about differences between distros?

Probably trying to share a Stream drive between Linux and Windows. Trying to run games from NTFS just didn’t work and resulted in all kinds of weird issues. I was close to giving up on Linux but after I switched to an ext3 partition things just started working :|

In Fedora, Discover shows this in the top right corner. It also shows the available package sources under Settings. Perhaps this is not yet available in the older Debian version of Discover. You could also just look at the version of certain software. E.g., if GIMP is version 3.x it’s a flatpak (or snap), otherwise it’s a Debian package.

The Linux Experiment recently looked into touchscreen support of different desktop enviromenents. His findings mostly align with your comment. However, this seems to be one of the rare cases where the distro matters for Gnome. Upstream Gnome (e.g., as shipped by Fedora) works fine with touch screens, but support on Ubuntu Gnome appears to be quite broken.

The Linux Experiment videos:

• 1: KDE, Ubuntu Gnome
• 2: Fedora Gnome, Others