spamegg wrote: ⤴Wed Mar 27, 2024 9:39 am
To be fair though, there isn't much we can do without being in front of your PC [...]
The way I see it it's not as much knowing all details as knowing the principle on which debugging is based. One could start with generic questions like "have you installed/removed anything lately?", "can you perform
this or
that?", in order to gather a few more information. Some of the questions may even trigger the right idea.
It's true those particular logs didn't offer any solid clue as to where the problem lied. Subsequently I had even installed the debug version of Python 3.6 and still didn't offer much in addition. Had to change strategy: search for Python modules installed within a limited time frame, both locally and globally, and start uninstalling one by one while checking if the app was still crashing. That was much easier than anylyzing the mumbo-jumbo in the logs. Thankfully I had Double Commander with a nice assortment of plug-ins, that helped with searching and other operations, as Nemo the file browser was as dead as the desktop - them being closely linked together.
Suggesting an upgrade is borderline humiliating. If one wanted to upgrade they wouldn't have asked for help on a particular and very technical matter. People who have certain degree of technical knowledge and are willing to delve into an operating system's inner working would never resort to upgrading unless everything else fails. And even in that case they wouldn't ask others whether they should upgrade or not - they would just do it.
Just as an aside, all the changes I noticed in versions of Mint later than 19.2 were the removal of options and features; since I do need and want some of those features I
willingly decided to stay with this version. It is
my choice and
my right as much as it's anyone else's to do what they want with their own hardware and software.
Safety is not a concern for someone who spent almost 20 years on the Internet
and testing alpha-grade software on a Windows 98SE machine with no firewall and no resident anti-virus. And by the way, that system was (and still is) not a vanilla installation but heavily upgraded with libraries taken from various newer OS versions (2000/XP/Vista/7) as well as KernelEx and other enhancements. It has
never been reinstalled all this time; the main folder dates back to
2006 when it was first installed on that drive. Compared to that this Mint (installed in 2019) which only sports a few minor enhancements such as Nemo 4.6.0, a few newer Python modules, newer self-compiled applications, a custom theme, and a few system file improvements (check out my repositories below in the signature) is much closer to a vanilla installation. I would've been ashamed not to be able to fix it after all the work that's gone into building it for these last years.
Now, isolating each and every piece of software from the global environment would be hilarious at best. Flatpak does a lousy job at that by delivering multi-gigabyte packages for applications that wouldn't take more than 10-20 megabytes at most. On that rate everybody should soon buy exabyte-grade drives in order to hold all their applications and the OS. It's not at all hilarious when programming is getting more and more sloppy such that no two system libraries or modules can work together in a global environment.
BTW, I have been testing a couple of my scripts in Debian 12.1 and indeed it growls at trying to install modules through regular
pip commands. This can at times be helpful as the user could then look through Synaptic or in Terminal through
apt for official .deb packages of the needed modules, and sometimes find some. But that's not always the case, and having multiple - possibly identical - versions of same modules scattered all around virtual environments wastes space to say the least. Unfortunately backward compatibility is almost an utopia in the Linux world. And that's precisely what lead to current situation.
Anyway, my machine is a 2009 model, a Samsung NP-R580 notebook upgraded to an i5 CPU and 8GB of DDR3 RAM. Video is a 512MB NVIDIA which has no proprietary driver available in newer Linux. I have a lot of external drives and none has more than 1% free space, most of the times less than 200MB. Internal drive usually has only 500-800MB free. With the amount of extra applications and that scarce space any newer OS version would fall to its knees begging for mercy. So I'd very much like to keep this machine as it is now for as long as it will still function because
I'll never afford anything else.
Thank you for your input.
