I opened my laptop for unrelated reasons and was greeted by a slightly bloated battery. Idk if the picture makes it clear, but the individual segments of the battery have slightly raised above the solid structure pieces in between. Laptop is just over a year old. I have already contacted the manufacturer, but with the holidays and everything I'm not sure when I'll get an answer.

Basically, I'm worried about the potential danger. I use my laptop a lot (usually plugged in). Since the battery seems to be screwed in and not glued, I could just take it out, but idk if that would be better than just leaving it in until the manufacturer sends me a new one or has me send it in for battery replacement.

Also, I hope that consumer hardware posts like this are accepted in this community. The rules at least don't state otherwise.

Edit: thank you all for your comments. I brought the bloated battery to a recycling center the day after I made this post. Communication with Medion support eventually led to me talking to a very pleasant service technician on the phone. He sent me a new battery, which I just installed. Everything is working great again.

"The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) has introduced the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2023–an absolutely awful bill that ignores years of abuse and unconstitutional surveillance in order to renew a mass surveillance law with no real changes, reforms, or new oversight.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is set to expire on December 31, 2023, and there is currently a race to see what bill will renew Big Brother’s favorite surveillance law. Any reauthorizations must come with significant reforms in order to protect the privacy of people’s communications. To that end, the choice is clear - we urge all Members to vote NO on the Intelligence Committee’s bill, H.R.6611, the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2023."

Hi everybody, bit of a warning here: The recovery key generated during the installation of Ubuntu 23.10 (if you select tpm-backed fde) cannot be used to unlock the disk outside of boot, as in any 'cryptsetup' command and so on will not accept the recovery key. unlocking when accessed from different system does not work etc.

You can use it to unlock the disk while booting if your tpm somehow fails, but ONLY in that specific situation.

I kind of purposefully broke my tpm keys to see if it could be restored with 23.10 and ended up having to reinstal, as I ended up having to enter the recovery key at boot every time and no way of adding additional unlock options to the volume, as cryptsetup would not accept the recovery key as passphrase.

This bug could be very bad for new users.

See this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-desktop-installer/+bug/2039741

I currently have a personal nas running ubuntu server, but I'm considering moving it to opensuse leap. I've dabbled a bit with leap inside of virtual machines, but maybe someone more experienced with it can give me a more complete opinion. Also, is btrfs worth getting into, or can I just use ext4 and loose out on nothing (except snapshots)?

I just learned that there are programs to control the brightness of external monitors just like you can adjust your laptop's integrated display. On windows, the most well known one is monitorian (FOSS), on linux you can (on Gnome) even use shell-extensions to have a brightness slider just like you do for the integrated display.

I might be out of touch, but is this well known?