One way to do it is have a small Python (or any other scripting language really) script that performs text replacements in the Latex source file. This is much easier in Latex because it’s plain text. I don’t know of a solution that doesn’t involve writing your own code (apart from LO/Word serial letters).

Is using Latex an option? I’ve done that and it works quite nicely. You can easily populate a template e.g. using Python.

That looks like a software issue… I would try a different distro or a different version of Ubuntu (e.g. 22.04).

Thanks for trying it out on your own system!

In my case, the problem was that the disk never showed up in the Fedora installer. I’ve quickly reproduced the issue in a VM (but I originally noticed it on bare metal):

As you can see in fdisk, the disk (/dev/sda) has been recognized correctly by the kernel and works as expected. But somehow the installer only shows the “internal” /dev/vda.

• Available Disks
• Blivet

After some further investigation, this seems to be related to the specific USB drives. I tried three different ones. It failed on a USB stick and the original external NVME enclosure. However, it did accept my USB to SATA adapter. So I guess I could install Fedora on my 10-year old HDD… 😐

Did you do anything special to install Fedora it on the USB drive? I couldn’t get it to do that and would be interested in testing F40 that way.

Ah, that would put a bit of complication into things. If you want to actually accomplish this though, you should largely start with the same steps as a standard system install, using a second USB flash drive to write the distro onto the external SSD, leaving enough space to build the rest of the partitions you need.

I’ve actually tried to install Fedora on an USB SSD to play around with it. But somehow the installer just refused to select the second USB drive as an installation target. I looked for quite some time but couldn’t find a way to do it. I ended up trying to install it manually like Arch (for fun), but never got a bootable system 😅 I was able to install Arch and NixOS on the same drive without issue.

I’m actually not sure how OP could achieve something close to what they’re looking for… A regular installation certainly seems like the right choice, but that may require using an internal drive.

The UFS storage inside an Android smartphone is basically an SSD. Both use flash memory, so it’s reasonable to expect that they have similar failure modes. But I’m not sure if you could diagnose such a failure on Android.

I have seen multiple (quality) SSDs with unrecoverable read errors after a few years. All of them had plenty of spare area left. Maybe some kind of retention issue?

Yeah, NTFS being the problem actually makes a more sense.

OP could also just use the fuse driver then. I’m using it on 5.15 (Linux Mint) and it works quite well. I only had problems when I tried to use it for a Steam library.

You could also try to switch the kernel version. Ubuntu 22.04 currently supports two different versions: 5.15 and 6.5, you could switch to the other one and see if the problem also occurs there.

Ah nice, thanks for pointing me to it!

Makes sense.

No, I wish for something like Alma, but declarative and atomic :)

What do you miss in NixOS (Unstable)?

I think a declarative, atomic LTS distro (e.g. Alma) would be quite nice for business use.

That looks quite weird… RHEL 9.2 was patched in February. RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 have now been patched too, but RHEL 9 (9.3) is still vulnerable?

Nah, it’s been upstream since RHEL locked down. Rocky’s been doing some funky stuff though.

AlmaLinux mostly ships packages that are maintained by Red Hat for RHEL, which is why I called it effectively a downstream. But maybe we can just agree that they’re related and it’s complicated 😅

Good thing there’s flatpak, snap, appimage, nix, guix, distrobox, etc. to keep you up to date. The question is then: do you mind if your DE and drivers don’t change for years. And that’s perfectly fine for a lot of people.

Yes, the situation has certainly improved, especially for GUI applications. But there’s always some trade-offs involved with those alternative packaging options. The nice thing is that you can freely choose if you want such a very-LTS option, or something fresher :)

AlmaLinux is effectively a downstream of RHEL, so it inherits a lot of RHEL’s pros and cons. I think, from a technical perspective, it makes a lot of sense for professional applications. It has a rock solid base OS that only changes rarely, which has lead to widespread support among professional (commercial) software. On top of that you get more regular updates to hardware support and (some) applications. You also get very long support times, which can make sense for some use cases.

On the hand, this model certainly also has its downsides. Towards the end of the life cycle, the packages get very old, especially the base OS (e.g. RHEL 7, which goes EOL this year, ships with gcc version 4.8). If you care about having the latest and greatest packages, this is not a distro for you. It’s also not clear if Red Hat will try to further crack down on their downstream distros…

Overall, I think it’s a good choice for a professional environment, where you don’t need bleeding edge packages. Some commercial software also doesn’t give you a lot of other options. For personal use, I’d probably look for another distro, unless you’re looking for a very slow update cycle.

I would argue that any majoritarian electoral system (winner-takes-all), including ranked choice, incentivizes large parties. There is some nuance between them, but I don’t think that ranked choice can fundamentally solve that issue. Sure, you can enter a protest vote, but will it really change anything? I think that parties need realistic changes at gaining (some) power in order to be viable in the long term.

Given that Fedora is a distro that aims to be on the frontier of new features and technologies, the inclusion of KDE seems like a much better fit than Gnome.

Would you mind explaining how introducing ranked choice voting would substantially help smaller/additional political parties? I always find it confusing how much Americans focus on the presidency and ranked choice voting when it comes to breaking the party duopoly. At the end of the day, there is only a single president and he/she will probably always come from one of the largest parties. The presidency somewhat inherently limits the influence of smaller parties.

What I would focus on, if I wanted to increase the number of political parties in the US, is the House of Representatives. If proportional representation (e.g. biproportional appointment, party lists, MMP, …) was introduced there, it would allow smaller parties to hold real power. (With biproportional appointment, the seats are distributed according to party voter share while also ensuring regional representation). Do you know why this hardly ever comes up in the context of the US?

You could try to downgrade simple64 to an older version: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/tips-and-tricks.html