Gnome is a great, low-distraction desktop environment but it’s certainly not perfect out of the box. Fortunately it’s easy to spruce up. Here are some of my favourite extensions!

This guide is mostly a reference for myself as it’s a workflow that I find myself following whenever I set up a new Linux machine. I’m sharing it here as I’m sure many will find this useful, and it will save me from looking up each distinct step in the future.

I also took the opportunity to add some bonus network configuration tips to get the most out of the setup.

I recently installed Fedora on my personal laptop to replace Manjaro as I found Manjaro to be a just a little too flaky for my liking and I know Fedora to be a solid alternative. During installation I was asked if I wanted to encrypt my drives. Now I’m not harbouring anything particularly sensitive but I thought it was worth doing, security first and all that; after all, we expect every website to support HTTPS these days so why not?

Well there is the matter of that mildly pesky login prompt on every boot…

Today I spent a bit of time fighting with certificates in an ASP.NET application I’m working on. The scenario is we have Blazor Server communicating with a Minimal API. Debugging locally I was struggling to get the two to communicate, with errors like:

The remote certificate is invalid because of errors in the certificate chain: UntrustedRoot

A quick tip here for when a bluetooth mouse takes a moment to react after not being used for a few seconds. Bluetooth autosuspend can be disabled with a negligible power consumption penalty by setting a kernel parameter on boot.