Lately I noticed I couldn’t lock the screen on Ubuntu 20.04. Specifically: Two 1080p monitors connected through a Thunderbolt 3 dock Hit Super+L after booting up The lock fails, GNOME Shell crashes and restarts, and then nothing happens

I had a really weird problem, and it haunted me for about a year. At home my laptop sits in a Thunderbolt 3 dock, and on that dock I plugged in a USB DAC to make sure my desk has a headphone output, plus that USB DAC also feeds two speakers. Short version: I don’t use the dock’s built-in audio. I added a separate USB DAC on top. Starting last year, that DAC began acting up in a strange way: whenever I played music or video, the sound would crackle. At first I blamed the dock, but plugging the DAC straight into the laptop’s USB port made the problem disappear. It only happened when it was plugged into the dock, which pointed to a power-delivery issue.

Recently, in order to play World of Warcraft Classic, I dug out an SSD portable drive, installed Windows to Go on it, and set up all sorts of software for gaming. Then I noticed the problem: The time shown under Linux and under Windows is always different Truth is, the reason is simple enough. The two systems handle time differently: Linux sets the BIOS clock to GMT 0 (UTC) and works out the local time from the time zone, while Windows just writes local time straight into the BIOS.

I bought a Mi Pad 4 a while back. Honestly it has no other problems, but for gaming it has a huge one: **Namely, “touch dropouts.” Actually, this kind of touch dropout is an old issue with Xiaomi and the like. Lots of people have talked about it — from the Mi Mix 2s to the Redmi Note 5, it’s everywhere. Many say the problem is that Xiaomi’s touch ICs just aren’t good, and the Mi Pad 4 being a low-end product certainly wouldn’t use any fancy touch IC. So not long after buying this tablet, after playing some Honor of Kings on it for a while, I noticed the screen touch started jumping around, and sometimes it would just randomly cut out… or stop responding. At first I concluded the root cause was: Because the touch chip is cheap, after the machine runs for a while and heats up, the touch goes haywire.

Recently I ran into a permission problem on Ubuntu. It shows up when downloading stuff like flash or mscorefronts. I’d been ignoring it all this time, but today I decided ignoring it isn’t great. Files can’t be accessed by user ‘_apt’, and the permission can’t be dropped for downloading The fix is simple…

Recently I ran into a problem with my OnePlus 5: I plug it in, turn on USB debugging, run adb devices, and the list is empty! Tried everything, but the phone just would not show up in adb devices.

Firefox just updated to 44.0, and for Linux users that means a new problem. Fonts look like garbage. Like this:

If you use Firefox in fullscreen as much as I do, you’ve probably hit the same problem I have. What happens is this: while I’m browsing fullscreen in Firefox, I click some other popup window and it opens underneath Firefox instead of coming to the front. WiFi status, uploading images to Weibo, all sorts of stuff. And it only happens under Unity. Annoying as hell. Well, there’s a fix now.

I tried enabling full hardware acceleration for YouTube on Linux a while back in this post. If you unfortunately did the same, upgrading to Firefox 43 today probably broke YouTube video loading for you. First it’s this… Then it’s this… After digging around for a while I finally found the fix…

My Acer C720 running Ubuntu has never given me any trouble — it’s just been a terminal netbook for configuring switches and servers. But recently I figured it’d been a while since I updated, so I got the itch and ran an update. Which is when I hit this. “The file list of package XXX contains an empty filename” No idea why this happens. From poking around some Debian docs, it’s probably from a flaky connection pulling down an incomplete package or list and then force-installing it.