My review: Ravenloft - Heir of Strahd by Delilah S Dawson ►

◄ Iron Maiden: the remaining six albums (2000-2021)

This entry is part of my Project Zebra series covering migration to Linux for personal computing use.

Another day, another Lenovo M series tablet. This time an M10 which seemed to be a 2nd Gen from 2020 based on the photo and is indeed a TBX306X made in 2022. So it's Android 10, with a basic 32MB/2MB and 1280x800 screen, and my hope is it'll be fine for video content and be a basic TV device. Not multi-tab browsing, task switching, games, etc, and I won't even try with that amount of memory. I was looking at larger ones but figured I'd give this a punt for thirty quid delivered plus eight for a silicone case and pack of screen protectors. The battery seems okay.

As with the M range reviews are mixed about a budget tablet:
https://blog.tusharnene.com/lenovosmarttabm10hd/
https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/lenovo-tab-m10-hd
https://www.androidauthority.com/lenovo-smart-tab-m10-hd-review-1208995/

It's even more stock Android than the slightly later M9 and M8 models I've got, which is a good thing, and apart from some garbage app pushing at setup and a few things to disable, I've just set it up with its own Google account with no payment method to facilitate watching stuff directly from Drive, NewPipe, iPlayer, etc.

Older news because I haven't uploaded notes in quite a while...

That was quick;
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/06/kubuntu-25-10-drops-x11-session
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/24/mixed_news_for_x11/
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/the_price_of_software_freedom/
But it looks like X11 will remain viable for Plasma 6.x, so there's time to periodically try KDE Neon in a VM and see if it's fit for purpose yet.

Although Neon is now no longer the test reference distro, or shortly won't be https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/kde-linux-immutable-distro-alpha-released https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/06/announcing-the-alpha-release-of-kde-linux/

In any case, it's all still preferable to https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/28/windows_11_is_a_minefield/

And Plasma is having a focus on accessibility, which is nice. Whereas some time back Gnome removed alt-key visual identifiers and has also broken most screenshot tools:
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/149
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/10/gnome-screenshot-app-no-longer-works-in-gnome-49

More recently, in passing Ubuntu is switching out initramfs-tools for something developed by a direct competitor: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/10/what-is-dracut-ubuntu

Debian 13 released in August, which ships Plasma 6.3
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/08/debian-13-trixie-released-with-2-years-worth-of-improvements
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.en.html#issues-to-be-aware-of-for-releasename
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/12/debian_13_trixie_released/

However, 12 still has plenty of support left - https://www.debian.org/releases/ - with June 2026 its two year expiry but LTS arrangements until 2028 and extended LTS until 2033. I'll probably have a look at 13 end of the year or early 2026. There was some controversy around Debian including 6.3.0 over 6.2.5 and it looks like 6.3.6 made it in.

Debian has its minor quirks such as handling of root but I'm not sure if one of them is that I needed to install systemd-timesyncd to get automatic time synchronisation working, as the option was greyed out in Plasma system settings. This replaced ntp which I'd tried to install first per the same conversation.

Some interesting discussion of hibernation in Linux:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/22/linux_hibernation_patch/

In old-hardware-news, the going rate for ThinkCentres the same vintage as mine (not with as much RAM, storage or with PSU, just the base unit) is now fifty quid or under. Much better ones with an i7 and 32GB are still only a couple of hundred. Good to know.

This bears watching (and supporting any legal action that arises) - Google is attempting to block side loading:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/26/android_developer_verification_sideloading/
https://forum.f-droid.org/t/google-will-require-developer-verification-to-install-android-apps-including-sideloading/33123

So for example users could lose access to games like Portal, which have been ported by a solo developer, as well as things Google want to kill like NewPipe.

Portal for Android, which at some point I'll look into trying:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/1aywyir/comment/ks0g6om/
https://www.bennettnotes.com/post/play-portal-on-android/
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_on_Android

Windows 10 is officially out of support for anyone not paying Microsoft or otherwise making extended support arrangements, something that apparently can variously be done by using MS virtual currency or selling out your data to OneDrive. Which should tell you all you need to know about whether you should be running Windows and trusting anything to an evil empire. This is a company with software on millions if not billions of devices, producing security patches to (try to) prevent those machines being treated as only good for landfill or being compromised and used for criminal activity, but which will withhold those critical updates that it's producing anyway.

What's also interesting is the mainstream reaction. There hasn't been enough headline news about environmental impacts of hiking hardware requirements yet for my liking, which Microsoft deserves to be a pariah and heavily sanctioned for, and the same for Copilot. There's been a definite uptick in people discussing the fairly easy option of just sticking alternatives such as Linux Mint on that perfectly good hardware. There's open discussion and YouTube videos of the fact that Windows 10 versions are all basically the same thing, with walkthroughs of how to run a few Powershell commands to use MassGrave scripts to turn a Windows install into Pro and then activate 3 years of updates with ESU.

Related chaos / poor design... Secure Boot certificates expire in June 2026. I'm fairly sure I have UEFI disabled on the old ThinkCentre I'm using, but am making a note to come back to that. For people running Windows, MS has also already broken preboot environments.

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