The number of screws in things these days. And the screws they put under stickers/rubber feet etc..

And when you've taken all the screws out you have to unclip all the fragile plastic clips with a spudger to the point where it feels like it's going to break. Or you unclip one side and the other side re-clips.

It's all so fucking hostile to maintenance/repair.

My desktop PC finally gave up the ghost so I replaced it one of these and I've been very impressed with it. For something so compact it's *really* easy to get into. They even have a disassembly guide on their own Youtube channel, which is lovely.

(it's running arch btw)

 

The frustrating thing is I've been working on what will be the replacement for the broken machine, but it's still in the process of being setup.

Was hoping to spend January making it sufficiently usable, so I can relegate the last Windows machine to graphics and music (since there are still no good Linux equivalents to Cinema 4D, Lightroom, Music Bee, Paint Shop Pro.)

Except I also have a bunch of other tasks that needed doing ASAP, and now this is yet another blocker on top of the stack.

If I can't make progress in figuring it out today, I'll have to accelerate work on the replacement, transfer the Windows stuff to a VM, and hope I can get everything important going quickly enough without making compromises. (Like why the fuck does a PDF viewer have PulseAudio as a dependency. :@)

> Like why the fuck does a PDF viewer have PulseAudio as a dependency

Hahaha. Which one?

 

Okular.

It's not a direct depends - comes via phonon4qt5 - "a task-oriented abstraction layer for capturing, mixing, processing, and playing audio and video content."

Since Okular doesn't support any audio or video formats, I don't know why it thinks it needs that, and haven't yet checked if there's a compile option to ignore it.

Does it ... plug into notification systems or something? Cos yeah that's weird.

As far as I know phonon's *only* for A/V stuff.

FWIW I use mupdf and it's great (for my needs of: being able to read a pdf when I'm forced to deal with one)

Apparently there's a video widget in there. Why? Who knows...

Main problem with Mupdf is the lack of table of contents.

So after hours of screwing and prying I managed to gain access to where the CMOS battery is - removed it and tried to boot, no change, restored it, no change.

So either the battery is dead, or it's the graphics card that died, or something else.

Or I undid a vital wire/ribbon that I forgot about and didn't reconnect.

Ahh, for all those video-pdfs.

(hug)

I've searched all over hells half-acre for a good Linux pdf viewer. Best I came up with so far is Foxit, which isn't open source and (AFAIK), removed their Linux binaries quite recently. I run it in Fedora 40 (buggy) and also Win 10, though Adobe reader is slightly better on that.

Dunno about the video player stuff.

I stopped using Foxit on Windows when they started included adverts. Switched to Mupdf-based Sumatra PDF, which was lightweight and did everything I needed, but is Windows only.

The poorly named qpdfview has fewer dependencies than Okular (is only Qt instead of KDE), but depends on Cups, which I'll need to recompile to remove Avahi crap.

Now they (Foxit and Acrobat) have AI junk shoehorned into the interface.

Please elect me leader of the world so I can bestow well-deserved punishments on every arsehole involved in all this so-called "AI" crap. :@

It's probably the biggest grift since crypto.

Any news on the computer, Peter?

Not really.

I disconnected the graphics and RAM, but neither had any effect on behaviour.

Trying to get anywhere with the supposed replacement machine is roadblock after roadblock, with a few brick walls and dead-ends thrown in.

Everything sucks. Anything that seems good is a lie or a temporary illusion.

:(

Sorry to hear that. The world of fixing (trying to) a broken computer is like this most of the time. Replacing it is often doubly so. I'm sure it will all work out in the end. As you aren't at the end yet that isn't much use.