Thank you, Lord, for giving me back my daily driver! š„³
What happened
TL;DR: A kernel update.
One my my unofficial responsibilities at my church is to download the videos my mom finds for her kids' class. The church has lousy WiFi, to say nothing of mixing mid-SENTENCE ads and kids with ADHD and what not. Now I've been using my Mac for the past few days, ever since my daily driver Linux box decided to have a "Kernel Panic!" attack. I wish WiFi were better on my Raspberry Pi 5, cuz it's beefy enough to be my main computer. As it is... I did manage to "brew install yt-dlp" and it seemed to work... until I moved the file off the Mac. idk what went wrong, I'm not gonna turn this into an Apple-bashing thing cuz I probably made some other mistake (though again, idk what) but it didn't work.
So just for kicks, I turned on my Linux box. It's what I've used every other Sunday (and literally every day after hours). Turns out, the GRUB bootloader offered "advanced options for Ubuntu" (I'm on XUbuntu atm). I chose one with a different kernel version, power it on, and BINGO! Aleluya, I got my favorite computer back! i'm writing this on it right now! And yes, I got my mom her video (she's one of the coolest teachers I've ever seen - and I'm not just saying that out of love - object lessons, videos, games, prizes... what kid wouldn't want a teacher like that?). Anyway I also see I have lots to catch up on here! Of course I knew about (and plan to write about) Mainframe Week, but wow, lots of other cool stuff going on over here.
What to do next?
I figured, okay, if a kernel update broke my system, is there a way to tell the bootloader to just use the usable one? Now i've done some boot sector programming, and I would put "creating an OS" as a bucket list item... but i don't really know what i'm doing with GRUB specifically. So I asked an AI:
https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/gGuseJuZ86vuvKncGTmTj
I haven't dared to reboot yet (I have no reason to), but I'm pretty sure I did the right thing. If not...
As for the Mac...
I'm grateful I had it. My other options were:
- The Pi 5, best specs but not easy to work with cuz its WiFi seems to be a bit of a flake.
- A clunker I changed the password on (also for my mom's class) and then forgot
- An even bigger clunker that runs Win10 painfully slow
- Or a Pi 3B+ I don't want to use cuz that's my dev server / mainframe. :-)
I'm blessed to have so many great computers, though most people would say they're all junk. But being stuck on the Mac for a few days really helped me immerse myself in the new environment. My old "alien planet" analogy fits. Though at the moment, I feel more like a knight, who after having traveled off to distant lands on an epic quest, has now returned to his ancestral home, a glorious old castle in the land of Linux. š°