Recently, I took a distribution version update for a Ubuntu system with a GTX 460 and I ended up spending a few hours to find out that the proprietary driver no longer works with the newest kernels. The open source nouveau driver didn’t handle the decade old card any better. I had to downgrade to an older LTS kernel and use Nvidia’s driver.

A different machine of mine running Raven Ridge integrated graphics recently also started to have issues. It freezes and dumps scary red text about amdgpu to the kernel ring buffer. This reminds me of when I first bought the machine in 2018, when Raven Ridge was new and the drivers for it nascent. It eventually stabilized, but now the crashes are back.

Despite all the woes, I’m getting the Pine64 Note, an eReader running mainline Linux. I’ll probably have problems with it. The userland is new, and maybe the graphics drivers will flake out on me, but I’m going with it anyways.

This is an aspirational purchase. I want to read more. Glance away from the ultraprocessed flashing lights designed to monetize my attention. Also, diagnosing these issues doesn’t seem like the worst hobby. To borrow from the chapter about sunsets in The Anthropocene Reviewed, “I want to be earnest, even if it’s embarrassing.” I want to get out of my armor of cynicism and be vulnerable.