Millions of people using Windows 10 are facing a tough choice. Microsoft plans to stop offering security updates for the system, leaving countless computers vulnerable. For many, upgrading to Windows 11 simply isn’t an option because their hardware isn’t new enough. This situation is pushing users to look for alternatives. But here’s a fresh twist […]
Who did? I didn’t quite follow.
A KDE update broke its lock screen. Locking the computer would bring up a message reading “The lock screen is broken and doesn’t work anymore, to unlock the computer, hit Ctrl+Alt+F1, login and enter this command.”
Interesting that there’s a “failsafe” like that though.
Hah. Those used to be a lot more common, this is actually a bit of a blast from the past.
Early graphical Linux interfaces were constantly breaking and telling you to go back to a terminal to restart your X server or fix whatever was broken manually.
That used to be the “but you have to use the terminal” of very early Linux, back when “can you install Debian from scratch?” was the old “can you install Arch from scratch?”
Man, I’m old.
It’s a thing on hyprlock as well 🙂 If I ssh into my desktop and kill hyprlock, it will give me instructions on how to get it running again.
Yeah actual error messages with helpful information are a thing on Linux.
The last time I tried to install Windows on something, there was some problem with the BIOS config, and Windows would get part of the way through installing and then a “FAILED TO INSTALL ERROR 0xA9BF4DAFDEB99B7AD46” or something. Installing Linux on the same machine said “Unable to install due to BIOS config. See here for details.” “here” was a hyperlink to the Ubuntu wiki, which you could open in Firefox because this is a live session with the whole desktop there, not some useless installer environment, nevertheless it gave a QR code to the same wiki page so you could visit it on a mobile device if you wanted to.
It’s like it’s meant to be used by humans, not the Borg. And not even like Borg Queen Seven of Nine Borg, like TNG era Borg.
Yeah, I don’t know who made the offending changes. I don’t think it’s fixed yet, I’m using a workaround at the moment.
It was a ufortunate situation as it coincided with Fedora infra move which lead to delays all around. Anyhoo, the new version, with fix for broken lockscreen on Plasma is available with qt6-qtwayland-6.9.1-3
I know the fix was up for testing, but I saw some people complaining about other issues with it and it wasn’t rolled into the latest live update for me last I checked, so now I’m using a lock screen wallpaper that doesn’t break and I’m not sure I have a way to tell when it’s fixed other than manually checking.
Also, the error message suggesting a way to manually unlock using keyboard shortcuts to a virtual terminal does not match the defaults on my distro, so that added to the confusion.
Say what you will about Windows, but it was a stark reminder of the places where a single monolithic commercial owner would prevent some issues that can happen in Linux/open source projects. A commercial software developer would almost certainly not have shipped something broken in this way, and if they did they would have rolled it back in an update immediately. They also wouldn’t have had a black screen with some tips on how to bypass the issue, presumably, and if they did they certainly wouldn’t have been just… wrong, or mismatched.
Like I said, pros and cons, but it was a disappointing experience. Mostly because… well, yeah, I can understand what happened and troubleshoot it, but a) I didn’t have the time, so I certainly was glad I am dual booting and could just flip to Windows for the time being, and b) a whole bunch of people would not have been able to troubleshoot this or comfortable tryign to do so even if the provided instructions in the workaround were accurate to their system.
Maintainers, I guess, as in, the update that was rolled out, was broken for some users. But I don’t know if that’s the case here
I meant MS or KDE.