Crunch time? That sounds bad. Are they having issues with project management?

Wow very cool. Thanks for that link, I had no idea coreboot was so flexible!

lol, one of our suppliers just changed to them 1.5 years ago.

Someone managed to fuck the portal software up so much that all the ö you type in a support case get replaced by o, both in the webview and the emails. The ä and ü work fine. It’s extra fucked.

And our support team sits in Germany, we write in German sometimes. When we use English it is only for the benefit of their Tier 3 guys.

Plus the implementation of two factor sign in is now delayed by half a year already. It seems to me more developers could be helpful

If anything, passing the Turing test would be a necessary condition, but never a sufficient one.

Oh I’ve never heard of such a setup. But that does muddy the lines a bit, I can see the argument for calling it part of firmware then.

Firmware is one step before.

BIOS, UEFI, coreboot, or whatever weird code runs on a Raspberry Pi’s GPU to load your system, those are firmwares.

The firmware is what starts your bootloader; grub, BOOTMGR, u-boot, etc

Also the kernel makes those variable immutable by default now

More specifically it has done that for the last 8 years :-D

In A UEFI World, “rm -rf /” Can Brick Your System

efivars are made read only by the kernel. That firmware bug (!) was worked around in the kernel years ago.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.rst

Specifically in 2016: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ed8b0de5a33d2a2557dce7f9429dca8cb5bc5879

Bunch of assholes. Hope it hits the responsible managers house and the office building.

[…]codenamed the Manhattan Project, like the World War II project of the same name, and the idea was to displace the Japanese[…]

a bit on the nose huh

I thought that was still not officially available, only forks or rebuilds of sorts?

I never had an optical drive that had this connector, but it seems plausible that the relatively smaller pins could still carry enough power for it.

The most power hungy bit would probably be the spinning motor, and the mass being spun is much lower in an optical drive than for a magnetic drive platter.

Ah that rings a bell, some of my (older) PSU cables have one of those at the end after a daisy chain of SATA or Molex

Something like the rightmost in these pictures?

I think they are called Floppy connectors

also a non sata connector

Like the older Molex, or something really custom made to fuck users over?

First you will have to find out about your specific phone model. It seems that different chipset vendors implement different things for tethering.

Someone in the raspberry pi forums checked what his Pi Zero was doing with lsusb -t and someone in an old reddit thread checked his dmesg while connecting the phone and turning on tethering, maybe you can try those things while tethering to see whether currently the RNDIS or the USB CDC driver gets loaded for your phone.

Then we will have to see in which kernel version Greg’s change finally lands. At the earliest it will land in Kernel 6.14 because 6.13 is already on the fifth release candidate so new changes shouldn’t be added anymore. Then you have to find out when your Mint install will move to that kernel. If you are currently on Mint 22 Wilma (supported until 2029), then that’s based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, which is based on the Ubuntu LTS Kernel 6.8.

I’m guessing now, based on past regularities, that Mint 23 will be based on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, and that Ubuntu will choose a fresh kernel for their LTS in the beginning of 2026, so probably one that will contain this change by Greg. So it seems to me, that if 1) your phone still needs RNDIS for tethering and 2) you still have that phone in the middle of 2026 and 3) you still have that Mint install you should probably not upgrade to Mint 23, but stay on Mint 22 until its support ends in 2029.

But projecting that far into the future is kind of difficult, maybe distro maintainers will reenable RNDIS if they see it’s still needed, or maybe a future Android Update will force OEMs to use USB CDC.

Ah man, that’s a shame. The P41 was one I remembered for being a surprisingly good value despite being a drive with good performance. I never had the chance of buying one, since I don’t have a free slot, and it wasn’t worth replacing my existing drive.

Yes, with the exception of some that switched to USB CDC NCM already. I seem to be lucky, the Pixel 6 is one of the first to have made the switch.

Speaking of illegal weird cables: I actually have a Y shaped cable, USB Type-A male to USB Type-A female with an extra red USB Type-A male to inject more power if the host can’t power the device otherwise.

I’ve used it once to attach an external HDD to an Android Phone with an OTG male micro-B to female A adapter. It worked but it was kind of stupid :-D

USB-B has several different ends, some more well known than others.

micro-B SuperSpeed is always a good one to surprise people with.

I’m 99% wireless these days so I wouldn’t be surprised if chorded chargers are largely on their way out, but I’m still curious.

How fast is the wireless charging these days? I’d be surprised if it’s anywhere near the higher USB PD 3.1 modes.