Up The (soldering) Irons!

Yeah this sounds like a disk/ssd hardware problem to me. Possibly only one part of the disk is bad and giving inconsistent results.

The key enrollment that Mint did sounds like registering the Machine Owner Key (MOK). That basically tells the bios that anything signed with that key should be permitted. The MOK is especially required when compiling your own drivers. Anything shipped by a Linux distro should already be signed so that the shim will permit it. SecureBoot is more about making sure your boot files haven’t been tampered with rather than being about preventing the owner from doing something.

You should already be able to boot any modern Linux OS that has support for SecureBoot. Only if you compile your own drivers or kernel would you need to use a MOK. If you do need that, you should be able to enroll another MOK or copy the MOK key files from the Mint install and use those keys to sign drivers in any other Linux distro.

The cli program mokutil will let you view and export your enrolled MOKs.

Use brew to update the core Unix utils such as bash, tar, sed, etc to the latest GNU releases. The mac has really outdated BSD-based versions.

It’s common in the US Tech industry. It’s considered “voluntary” because you could always say no and find a different job, or you could negotiate the removal of that clause. Often at the beginning they give you an opportunity to list your existing obligations that would be exempted. Always read the fine print of your employment agreement.

It sounds like the SSL/TLS version or allowed cipher list are configured for higher security on your machine or browser and the sites that are failing are using a lower security config. I’m not sure where that config is on Arch. Try a different browser. Also try fetching the sites with curl just to see if that works. Curl’s verbose mode will also tell you what ciphers it tried.

curl -v https://example.com/

A quick fix might be to disable any ipv6 addresses if you don’t specifically need them. The vpn /could/ be ipv4 only, which /could/ leave your ipv6 free to leak or make ipv6 dns requests.

Agreed. Theoretically possible, but practically not possible unless you are an embedded hardware engineer with access to Sony’s datasheets and potentially crypto keys. Some sort of external box is much more practical.

assfish are soft and flabby

Agreed. Windows updates will very likely break your single-drive dual-boot at some point. So, use two different drives and use your bios/efi to choose which one to boot.

Edit: check out https://hackaday.com/2021/11/30/linux-fu-the-ultimate-dual-boot-laptop/

Edit 2: Framework 16 looks like it would meet your needs. It has two M.2 sockets for drives. https://frame.work/products/laptop16-diy-amd-7040

It was a very popular song in the 80s. Jenny’s phone number was 867-5309.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny

If you’re ever at a store and need a frequent shopper card, this number with your local area code is usually registered.

Junior devs don’t know Jenny.

The vendor will absolutely take that custom code and use it to extract maximum profit from a different customer. I’ve experienced it from both sides of the transaction. Open source at least allows the functionality to be “developed” only once.

It doesn’t even have to be offshore accounts. Just a fat long-term maintenance contract would be enough to hide a lot of corrupt costs.

800TB of bandwidth per month?

If you’re not already, use it as your main system. Don’t dual boot. Stop using windows and mac. When you run into something you need to do, figure out how to do it on linux. It will be slow going at first, but after a few months you will pick up more productivity than you had before.

Another commenter recommended the fish shell, but I disagree because fish is not posix compliant. Almost all of the shell script examples that you will find assume posix compatibility and will usually have to be modified to run with fish. Once you get comfortable with a posix-compliant shell, then maybe consider fish or another “modern” shell.

On the topic of shells, read the bash manual. It’s long and informative. You don’t have to memorize it, but be aware of the different concepts there, and refer to it when you need to. It’s pretty horrible as a programming language, but it’s what glues most of Linux together.

First, make sure it’s enabled in your kernel. Check the value in /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq to see if it’s enabled. Then see if you can trigger it by writing to /proc/sysrq-trigger. Then try an external keyboard that has real SysRq key. If all of those work, you may have to ask Framework support if their keyboard supports generating that keystroke.

The “Magic SysRq key” may be helpful as a last resort.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

I succeeded in doing this once long ago. Then while in the Linux vm I wiped the VM’s partition table, which wiped the physical disk partition table, including windows. Do not recommend.