a failure - 22.04

Installation of l-ubuntu 22.04 is like free-solo on a way too difficult route - my dream is to get high (lol) enough, so that I don't survive the fall, since surviving means probably life in a wheelchair. The new version is totally fucked up, for some reason it does boot more or less correctly on some old machines (Panasonic CF-C1 in my case, more or less = the state it is in depends on the disk used, every time I had to choose "safe graphics"). It makes noise, torturing the dvd-drive for more than half an hour, fails to init some Snap thing, and allows for installation. But on a newer Inspiron - in the best case of "Safe graphics" - it just shows a black screen with a cursor. After some trial & error, Ctrl-Alt-Fn etc. I figured out that actually the right mouse key works. Wow. None of the commands works, whining about inability to create some child process or so... Shit!

I followed some Dell BIOS-related hints and couldn't even boot from the dvd. The BIOS settings somehow updated themselves, adding boot options etc. Another SHIT.

Why bother? Well, there is some failure with upgrades recently. This turned out to be true for a non-LTS version, but I forgot that, in fact, since cat /etc/release doesn't work, I don't have any quick way to check which version I'm using... I thought all were 20.04. But moving to the newer version became necessary when I got some of partitions on 20.04 resized and - surprise - the machine doesn't boot anymore. But it shows a nice BLUE SCREEN with lubuntu logo and some dots, changing colour almost forever. By the way: before I messed with partition sizes, the machine used to boot or fail mostly randomly, sometimes being good at first try, sometimes requiring a few resets. I recall that it took like 2 or 3 reinstalls, since - in my more or less deterministic view - seeing "you need to load a kernel first" means that installation has screwed something up while setting up the bootloader. Anyway, it's just some ill humour of the machine, probably because of gpt partitions (that are required by the BIOS, I can't boot the thing using old fashioned partition table!) or some other issues of the BIOS itself.

Two times I managed to install 22.04 on older computers. And got some ~/snap directory. It seems that removing it is not recommended. At least firefox forgets its settings. Why another "I know what directory structure is better for you" feature. I typically lose some time on removing those horrible "Templates", "Desktop" etc. and their binds to file managers or window manager environment. Just because I like my workplace to be as unlike Windoze as possible. Then I read about the idea of "snap" and got terrified. What the heck... Why include that in an LTS version? Another super-feature: FF cannot save images and perhaps other things.

I have to move away from Windows-like Linux. Never mention gnu... No donation to Canonical this time, sorry guys and girls. Your distro has the memory and attitude of a jellyfish. And it smells of Redmond too much. 

Returning to 20.04. Or perhaps to Slackware. It's just easier... I wonder if they still support Lilo.

Fuuuuck!!! (inspired by the best heavy metal drummer, L. U.)

PS I got ff to work. Saving files is totally fucked up when I want to change the target filename - the focus is stolen by some search box that I didn't ask for. Even if I want to change one character in the name, at first try it says that such and such file exists. Second try - everything's fine if I judge it by FF's messages. But the file is not in ~/Downloads. Jeeeesuh Mother-faking Krist. Why?!... By the way - I tried out Gnome after 20 years of break. It's unusable, just some different world. But the night screen seems to be a cool feature. It's warm, but it's cool. Yeah, chill Beavis; dumbass!