panicked call from dad this morning. both the #firefox & #thunderbird apps i'd installed months ago in the #WSL #WindowsSystemForLinux Fedora distro i had set up for him, in his de-internetted #win10 (being the third* iteration of #EndOf10 workaround i'd conceived & deployed for him in Oct & subsequent {he was simply unable to get past his morbid "fear of Linux", which despite preparing him thru all of 2025 for it, ultimately scuppered my original plan to wipe win10 entirely & replace with Mint or Fedora}), this morn decided not to launch, but instead throw a weirdarse win10 WSL error msg. sigh.

* one being #VirtualBox #LinuxMint VM with ff & tb inside it [abandoned coz sucked up too much RAM & was slow to launch, then frequently froze]; two being #HyperV VMs with ff & tb inside, which were fast snazzy & reliable, but shockingly could not access his files & data, ie, useless; three being WSL.

remoted-into his pooter, had a poke around, saw the symptom myself but couldn't find the specific reason why win10 had chosen to do its latest bit of stupid shitfuckery. fiddled about a bit more, tried this that & t'other, including sticking a big screwdriver & knitting needle into it & stirring them around vigorously, whilst tapping lightly on the side with a ballpein hammer. somehow it then came good for me again. ergo, once more a happy dad... but a bewildered daughter who atm feels more like a witch-doctor than proper doctor. 🤔🤷‍♀️ 😲 🤯

#DadsPooterProject

An absolutely huge failing of my #Kinoite on Lappy is the atm 100% inability to be able to connect to my dad's pooter to do some tech support for him. Both #AnyDesk & #RustDesk work fine for that critical task from my Tower's #ArchLinux #KDE #Plasma. Ofc that's not an immutable, but it is #Wayland. Trouble is, atm Tower is all disconnected & partly pulled apart, for reasons.

In Lappy's Kinoite [also Wayland]:

• AD & RD Flatpaks did not work [cannot now recall any specifics, twas a week ago]
• AD & RD #Distroboxes also DNW.
• AD layered onto the core system with rpm-ostree does launch, does let me connect to him, but uselessly then presents an entirely blank window, ffs
• RD layered onto the core system with rpm-ostree does launch only in as much as its icon then appears on the Plasma panel task manager, but its actual window is entirely transparent, ie, invisible. In fact i can only know it's there via Plasma's Overview & Desktop Grid, in which is manifests as a rectangular border of transparent content [ie, i just see my own desktop wallpaper thru it]

Given dad rang me for help, i'm gonna hafta partly put Tower back together again & use it. I am really unimpressed.

How on earth do other users of Kinoite manage to use AD or RD?

#DadsPooterProject

Ranting about elderly father who doesn't understand shit about very very very basic pooter concepts [eg, is an email a browser? why doesn't it work when i try to send a thunderbird email i'm writing to a website url, & why are email addresses different?], so i get so many ucken calls that boil my blood coz all these ucken arguments arise... he knows nothing but nonetheless "is always in the right", & no matter how gently i try to educate him he ends up testy & snippy... then never remembers this "amazing new learning" so over time we go around & around & around, & gaaaaaaaah i'm so ucken over it.

and then there's this shit happens when i've remoted-into his pooter so he can show me his latest conniption, & he keeps jaquillions of windows open, all piled one atop the other, & if one loses focus & gets hidden behind some of the jaquillions of others then he no longer can find it & grows more & more frustrated / angry, madly clicking here there & everywhere, in a quite exquisite illustration of The Kessler Effect In Pooters. not to mention he seems clueless that when he points with his finger at his screen, 130 km away from me, & says "see, that one there", that no dad i can't ucken see & why do you always pull this shit on me?".

or pul-ease don't get me started on his bonkers devotion to the hideous ancient windoze pgm for making cards by the egregious Hallmark Greeting Cards bandits, which is so badly coded & styled that it still looks straight out of the early 90s, follows none of the normal GUI conventions, rapaciously opens in fullscreen with NO controls to resize it, & worst of all, stores all its cumulatively generated user data inside the pgm in proprietary file formats, such that if the pgm breaks or a dimwitted user uninstalls it coz they foolishly bought a newer version so-called that seems to me identical to the old version but whose installation first mandates uninstallation of the old, & coz the user doesn't know shit never bothered to learn some important basics like EXPORTING THEIR FUCKEN DATA BEFORE UNINSTALLING, so they pouff instantly lost all their data, but they still swear by [not at] this ucken pathetic app, & now intend to spend the next 500 years manually recreating all the data, & gaaaaaah i need alcohol.

😠 😱 🙄🤦‍♀️

#DadsPooterProject

I do not for one moment claim or pretend this is "best practice", nor that it is anything likely to find widespread interest or application. It is simply my solution for dealing with #EndOf10 with my 88 y/o dad, in a way that feels his "least worst" option. It is not my preferred solution, but it seems a workable compromise.

I had begun mentioning EoT to him some years ago, but he felt it was too nebulous, scary, & far off, so he ostriched.

In January this year i began mentioning & explaining it to him in more detail, & gently reinforcing to him that he was now only ten months from having to de-ostrich. I began much research & testing in VMs as to potential penguins for him. Having converted myself to The Land of Penguins in 2014 i knew how fab it is, but also that dad is not the geek i am, & also he's far from his sharpest days now, sadly.

The general concept of conversion is quite elementary, once you know, but in dad's case there were a few Important Sticking Points, incl.

• he had to be able to continue using his legacy HW [printer & scanner]
• he had to be able to continue using his legacy windoze greeting cards pgm [sigh]
• he had to be able to continue using his myriad MS Office 2013 spreadsheets & docs

Neither OEM has applicable Linux drivers for those HW, but eventually i was able to get #KFedora & #Mint [VMs (which i setup on his win10 pooter for PoC)] to work serviceably with both, just via the baked-in kernel drivers, albeit far less elegantly & control-nuanced as the proprietary windoze ones.

His docs' need was well met by showing him #LibreOffice & especially #OnlyOffice -- he concurred!

The penguin-unsolvable element was that bloody irritating cards pgm.

So, for the past several months, the plan i hatched for & with him was:

• sometime before mid-Oct, convert his win10 pooter to #Mint or #LMDE [i'd eventually eliminated KFedora, coz now it's #Wayland-only, & my #AnyDesk & #RustDesk #RemoteAccess apps are nfg for that]
• post-conversion, create a win10 VM in the penguin, with its internet disabled, for his silly cards pgm [printing it via the VM shared USB ports]

Within a few weeks of the deadline, it sadly became clear to me that despite all the handholding i had attempted along the way, "Linux" was looming in dad's mind as this terrifying ogre, & he was just miserable. This weighed very very heavily upon me... i wanted to make dad's pootering joyful, not miserable!

At 03:00 one morning i woke with a jolt, with a crazy-mad idea to solve the dilemma. In fact, this is exactly what we have now done:

• abandon my plan per se, or rather, invert it
• keep his current win10 as his physical OS
• create a Mint VM on it, for #Firefox & #Thunderbird
• disable win10 updates
• remove all browsers & TB from win10
• delve into the bowels of the win10 #firewall, & #Registry, to globally disable internet, with a very very few app exceptions, eg, #VirtualBox [for the VM, obvs].
• create a #SharedFolder & #SharedClipboard for him to easily work between his "new" FF + TB, & his Office 2013 apps [which ofc now also no longer see the internet]

This has been HEAPS more work for me than the original plan would have been, but that's unimportant given the primary objective has been met... facilitate dad not being miserable, whilst still keeping him safe & able to "do his stuff".

Fwiw.

#DadsPooterProject