Linux Mint reinstall time
Linux Mint badly needed a reinstall. I broke something by trying to run a simple gedit command to open several docs from one command, and it has not been the same ever since. Sigh! Gnome software, what can you do, eh? I lost all my gedit Snippets, External Tools and plugins just by running the aforementioned command, I kid thee not. I shook my head, thinking I was imagining this. After reloading my gedit profile, I ran the command again and yes, something is wrong in there; all my profile settings got wiped again.
As if that was not bad enough, at the next reboot, the box threw a kernel error in gibberish and told me it was about to enter bios, changed its mind and then booted anyway. What the actual.....?
Reinstall time. Maybe this time, I should really think very carefully about finding an alternative to gedit and use something else. Or maybe, I should never, ever again try to run gedit from the command line.
This is residual karma, I’m guessing. I gently cursed Gnome devs once in a post on here somewhere about how they handle bugs in Evolution, and karma came knocking. The thing is though, for every issue like this — and this is definitely a very, very, very weird issue — Gnome devs the world over will tell you that it is someone else’s problem. It’s always either D-Bus or your OS or you’re on an old version where that was a known issue but it’s a bug where there exists exactly zero records of any bug reports. They cannot reproduce it, have you tried to upgrade? I know better than to report this one because yes, the gedit version on Linux Mint 21 is version 41 over the current version 48, so maybe there was an issue there. Whatever.
I had initially considered remaining on Mint 21 and I even tried. Some more weirdness there as well. The reinstall went fine but at first reboot after the install, I was expecting to authenticate my secure boot MOK enrol. Nothing. The boot went straight to the logon window. Fine, so I signed in and there was no wifi available at all in my network settings. Nada. Hmm! That’s a shame because I loaded up the bootable USB stick version again and even in there I could find no ability to connect to wifi.
That decided it for me… we go with Linux Mint 22. It is a pity though, because I was very happy on Mint 21 thus far; it was rock solid and stable and I never had a single issue. I also do not recall ever seeing this no wifi issue on Mint before, most certainly not on the last good install I did.
The Mint 22 install went well (I made sure to check that wifi was available from the UBS stick; it was) and here I shall stay. My laptop has been running 22 for a while without issue save one: it does not like Citrix Workspace which I need to connect to the office. On my desktop, immediately after installing 22, I tested the connection to work and I’m glad to say that it went through first time without a hitch. So that is a good start. It might be time to push the laptop to 22.2 (it was built with 22.0) but maybe another Saturday.