bkil vs. programming

Unity is full of bugs.We all know it. Usually the window manager fails and decorations are gone. Sometimes all windows are stacked on top of each other at a corner. It's so bad that I had to write a script for killing and restarting the effected processes easily from a shell to resume working. All of this usually occurs when doing twisted deeds like opening a web page, however it can sometimes be triggered by toggling fullscreen or starting an application. It is always unexpected and unpredictable. If you know what to do, you don't loose any work and you don't even need to close any windows. So it's only a cosmetic issue at this level, but still not very professional. Interestingly, I have encountered this mostly in 2012-2014, and they have much reduced the occurrence rate from about 2015. Nonetheless, I don't use Unity on any of my new installs since about 2013 because of this. If you are fortunate enough to never have used this wonderful peace of engineering, ...

Installing a Huawei E352 HSPA+ dongle took ages under Windows. I had to abort it halfway through because I was running out of time. In retrospective, it was probably caused by a conflict with the previous modem's connection dashboard. I was shocked when I wanted to resume next time. Some time after inserting the device, the system asked for a .sys file from a driver disk. Neither modem worked anymore. As usual for this kind of dongle, no vendor download is available as the device itself contains all drivers on a virtual CD-ROM. However, that is only accessible before it's  switched to modem mode  by the parts already installed. Chicken and egg problem. Puppy Linux to the rescue! Thankfully, I had it on my USB flash along with DSL and SliTaz . The system loaded to RAM rapidly. I copied over the drivers from the modem to another USB flash. As a plaything, I enjoyed the command line and the responsivity, also browsing the web a bit over 3G. After rebooting to Windows, re...