When technology goes wrong

Remember that new laptop I was gushing about? I have no idea why, but all of a sudden, yesterday it decided to stop loading my desktop environment. Which… rude?

After some backs-and-forth in the #linuxmint-help channel on IRC, I wound up backing up my files and reinstalling. It was less painful than I might have hoped, except for the fact that I spent twelve hours sleeping off the stress. I woke up at 6AM and went “Hm, I feel pretty awake now,” and then I remembered This Fucking Shit and rolled over and went back to sleep.

Not the most healthy way to approach a problem, I confess.

I got Mint back up and running on a fresh install, and… it happened again? Which does not fill me with confidence about the state of the laptop itself. But I do vaguely recall reading people complain about this problem with this exact laptop; for that reason, I didn’t suspend the thing at all for a couple of weeks after I got it, instead opting to shut it down entirely every time I stopped using it. But I grew complacent, I guess.

I switched my desktop environment from Cinnamon to XFCE and haven’t had any issues since. And as an added bonus, XFCE lets me put desktop icons on the bottom screen, which, that’s pretty cool.

Only problem now is… I’m having a hell of a time with SSH. My keys just aren’t working? Previously I never had any problem copying and pasting SSH keys from one computer to another. I’ve tried chmodding the permissions. I’ve tried making new keys entirely and uploading those to where they need to go. And nothing.

But I don’t feel like dealing with that right now so I’ve moved this site from Digital Ocean to Neocities, at least for the time being. And in so doing I found that Neocities’ CLI respects git-ignore settings, so that’s cool!

I really do need to figure out what’s going on with these SSH keys and fix it, but I do not have the energy right now.

I nuked my Digital Ocean droplet for now. I might bring it back in the future if I figure this out. That does mean my Gemini capsules are gone too, but like… I wasn’t updating those anyway, and everything important from them is on this site now. Shrug.