I have Foxit installed and can usually use that, but am forced to have Adobe Reader installed for other reasons.

Adobe Reader will now never be updated on my machine. It’s a small price to pay. And Foxit is great for most pdf tasks.

There was a point not so long ago where Adobe Collaboration Sync got so bad on my Windows 10 box it wouldn’t let me close any pdfs that were open. “File in use” error, even if all Adobe programs were closed except for that pdf. I’d have to go into Task Manager and manually kill it. Between that and Adobe Updater I couldn’t get rid of it by any known means, and it was choking the shit out of my machine.

I’m transitioning to Linux but not there yet, still need the Windows box for now, so I had to do something. But I’m old school, so it was a DOS batch file to the rescue. I call it “kiladobe.bat”:

taskkill /f /im armsvc.exe       
del "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\1.0\armsvc.exe"      
taskkill /f /im AdobeCollabSync.exe     
del "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\AdobeCollabSync.exe"      

It’s now a scheduled task in taskschd.msc. I put kiladobe.bat in the main Adobe program folder (heh) and run that task as administrator at startup and every four hours or so, give or take an hour.

No more problems.

Now, all that remains is that every so often I see the command window flash up for a split second because this batch file is killing Adobe shit, and it just makes me smile. (I could probably make it stop flashing up the CLI, but I genuinely enjoy the reminder of how I’m fucking Adobe’s virus-like install and lock endeavors up the ass.)

EDITED TO ADD a simple “@echo off” by itself as the first line would probably turn off any appearance of the CLI, if anyone wants to use this text for their own batch file. If that didn’t work I’d probably throw a space and a “>nul” at the end of each line to grab the output and throw it into neverneverland.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Eventually it started slipping

If you still have the printer (you may not but I’m going to put this out there for others too) that sounds like a simple roller replacement, and rollers/pickup pads are usually considered “consumables” instead of “parts” because they all wear out over time. This is true for most if not all consumer printers, ink and laser alike.

Replacements should be pretty easy to find for even old printers, and the installation is usually pretty straightforward. Last year I was still able to buy a roller replacement set for a 19 year old HP, and it took me ten minutes and one Phillips head screwdriver to replace them all.

You can also just take out and clean the hell out of anything rubber with isopropyl alcohol, letting it dry thoroughly and then putting it back in, or if possible rotate the rubber on it to present an unused side, I’ve done all that a few times too.

For pretty much any model printer, search on the printer model number and “maintenance kit” to find available roller/pickup pad replacements for sale, and printer model number plus “service manual” to get replacement instructions if you need them.

You can do it on iPhone too, and I still do. Yeah, I know, I’m antiquated.

I like to set my default ringtone to silence, and then give known contacts a real sound for calls AND texts. I’ve been doing this for about ten years and the peace of it is fantastic. I didn’t wait for Apple to do it for me, I just created a 2 second .wav of silence and then jumped through the hoops to get it on the phone as a ringtone and then set it to default. The very few times I’ve missed a first time contact that I actually wanted to hear from is nothing compared to the mountains of unwanted shit I’ve missed.

But there’s a catch. Now, whenever I blow away the OS of an old device, I have to manually re-import my SilentRing.m4r since the devices are all still connected to my Apple ID – it doesn’t matter that my iPhone ring is silent if my iPad starts ringing anyway, lol.

Easy enough to do, though. I think Apple gives you the option of a default silent ring in the OS now, but for anyone who is using an older iOS or just wants to try it:

https://www.howtogeek.com/248489/how-to-add-custom-ringtones-to-your-iphone/

New to Linux, this is fantastic. Thank you.

This is an issue on my 14 year old laptop today.

On Lemmy, the modlog is not hidden and is open to all.

I don’t know how you’re seeing it on sh.it.just.works, but on lemmy.world it’s a link in the lower right of every page, down at the very end where it says

BE: 0.18.5 Modlog Legal Instances Docs Code join-lemmy.org

To see removed comments you would sort by action. Or if it’s your own comments that are gone, you would sort by user. And then just browse.

It’s sorted by reverse date, so newest are first, but if the removal is within the last day it’ll still be in the first couple of pages.

I also am fairly certain (but don’t quote me on this) that if you want to see the removed comments for a specific community you should access the modlog on that page, to ensure that you’re seeing the modlog for the instance hosting that community and not the modlog for your home instance.

On reddit I always would get a notice and explanation at least.

No, Reddit did not always inform you when they removed your comments; far from it. In the bigger subs it’s actually rare, and anymore they just remove AND shadowban you. Removed comments used to be easy to find, but these days post-APIcalypse you need to run your Reddit user ID through the Reveddit tool to see all your removed comments there.

As a technically literate person who is mostly new to Linux, Snaps along with Canonical’s corporate behavior was initially a dealbreaker for me.

Except now I’m on Zorin (a Ubuntu fork) and find I can install flatpak, apt, etc as well, so I’m not wholly opposed to it anymore.

Still think they’re assholes for taking initial steps in a paywall direction, though, not to mention doing the FOSS community that way.

I believe a USB WiFi dongle will be a better idea than modifying live images of various distros

Yeah, you and me both. But I’d be willing to do it for one or two, just to be able to prove that THIS laptop can and will run Linux with its current hardware, should he choose install it.

Also, the only thing lost by modifying LiveUSB trials is my time. If I corrupt the image, or it doesn’t work, or I make it crap out somehow – all of which is likely, lol – I still have done no harm at all. It’s just a USB stick. And I will also have learned a few things along the way, like how Linux distros install and use drivers.

you would be installing the firmware on the Linux system, not onto the WiFi module.

Then technically (not that I personally have the chops to do it) this “firmware” could also be something plugged into the distro on the LiveUSB stick along with the wl driver. That distro is getting its current drivers from somewhere on that USB already, so I’m not reinventing the wheel, just adding to what is already there.

I guess I just have to read up more. Thanks for letting me know the difference.

This I can do. Thanks!

This was an excellent listen, thank you for the link. I had no idea what was involved in it when I started, nor the roles of initd and launchd before it and what systemd was trying to replace.

The funny thing is that the guy giving the talk, Benno Rice, is primarily FreeBSD/openRC and not Linux, so he seemed fairly agnostic in presenting the various sides, not just from Unix and then Linux but also from the Apple viewpoint, who have also been playing a kind of parallel but separate role in this.

Very cool. Not a beginner level talk, definitely, but there was nothing I couldn’t figure out coming from Windows/Mac tech. Really informative, thank you again.

Those are all valid points, but there’s one more. As a person who is just coming back to Linux after 25-30 years and relearning it all from scratch, I just don’t want the hassle.

Sure, there’s overlap between distros, Linux is Linux, and any knowledge I might glean from Ubuntu would also largely apply to any other distro – but why should I bother with investing time into a product that is already heading toward future politics and regressive policies when I can just install [NotUbuntu] and swerve the entire mess?

There are hundreds of distros from which to choose these days, literally. Why start with one that’s already obviously moving toward the dark side? For all that I could just stay on Windows. I’m trying to get away from triple-E and paywalls and gatekeeping, not just find different ones.

Right now I’m testing out over a dozen distros on an old laptop in my spare time, and I think the only Ubuntu related one in my list is Pop!_OS, and it’s there only because Pop!_OS doesn’t rely on snap.

It’s one of those you should know what you’re doing situations

And I absolutely DO NOT, so that’s that, lol. These days every brain cell counts, so damned if I’ll waste any time wading into that mess.

Being open-source

Yeah, that. That’s exactly the problem. To quote @Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever above, who put it much better than I could:

. . . the main issues boil down to concerns over some parts of the Snap ecosystem being closed source, Canonical’s ongoing efforts to try to get some of the Red Hat “premium linux” money, and arguments that other solutions (e.g. flatpaks and appimages) are “just as good, if not better”. And it doesn’t help that Canonical/Ubuntu is increasingly pushing snap as “the only solution” for some applications.

When you speak of no single One True Way and things being completely open source, Canonical/Ubuntu have already left the chat.

Linus Tech Tips, no thanks.

EndeavorOS

I’ll add that to the list of distros I want to try, I hadn’t seen it before but it does run on minimal hardware. I like that it’s built on Arch because Arch itself is a good OS, but intimidating for a noob, lol. According to Distrowatch.com it’s near the top of their page hits so it must be popular. Thanks for the recommend!

Bungie will ban you for running destiny 2 on Linux.

That is so bizarre to me. According to this article, Destiny 2 was already playable on Linux when it was officially ported to Google Stadia, and no one, not even Bungie, can explain why they won’t support it on Linux or Steam Deck, much less ban a player for trying. That’s crazy.

I tried Budgie (packaged with Solus 4.4 “Harmony”) yesterday and loved it. It seemed fast enough even on this old MacBook with 4GB of RAM, but I was just test driving it on a live USB so I don’t know what it would do in a real world scenario. Even so, it was definitely the most pleasant OS/DE combo of all the distros I’ve tried so far.

Well, now I’m back to one USB at a time for Macs, using Rufus to do the deed and just overwriting the ones I know I won’t like. Same as it ever was. I think the problem has to do with how Ventoy interacts with the boot process that involves assumptions about Mac architecture; everything the author suggested, like enabling Grub2, just laughed and flashed the ol’ cursor. Not all Macs are the same under the hood and there have been some fairly big swings in architecture over the years, so when I read that he had not ever tested it specifically on a Macbook it made me think he tested it on one other Mac somewhere and that was enough for him, lol. I still think it’s genius just not on Macs.

Some of the distros I can try now; others have to wait until I get more memory in the Macbook. So right now I’m just doing preliminary look-sees just to find out if I like a given distro, and if it will find drivers and do hibernate without an issue. Funny thing is that one I can’t really look at yet except via review videos may be the one I go with: OpenSUSE Leap. As far as I can tell, it has no Live USB trial, you have to install it. But it’s incredibly feature rich, can bend to a user’s needs even if those needs aren’t foreseen out of the box, it’s not overly CLI dependent but CLI tools are there if you prefer them, has an extensive selection of software, supports multiple package handlers, and most importantly, the wiki is very complete. I just can’t install it until I get more RAM in the test box, lol.

I expect similar with Debian, to be honest, just because it’s so robust, though Debian does support live USB preview. Same with Pop! OS, there is a live USB preview but I have to wait until I get more RAM into the test box.

But of the ones I’ve tried so far, Linux Lite 6.4 seemed kludgy and repellent (not sure why, but I hated it); Zorin OS 16.3 Core was visually gorgeous but seemed VERY limited in other ways (maybe the paid tier would be different); Solus 4.4 “Harmony” with Budgie was responsive, intuitive, and fabulous to use but I need to look under the hood further, and Linux Mint 21.2 remains the winner so far, but I would rather go with a different desktop than Cinnamon (I do not find Cinnamon intuitive) so it’s on the list to retry with Kfce.

So I’m still looking. And now I have an in-law with an old MacBook Pro who is also paying close attention in case I find something, lol. But it’s all free and it’s been years since I did something like this, so I’m happy. Thanks again for your help!