Today I decided to update my laptop because it’s been way too long since I touched it. I put on Goosebumps and managed to watch a few episodes. As I was updating the laptop I kept watch on the progress because that’s what we all do, right?

I know I do.

At the very least when it comes to running computer updates because I haven’t trusted them to fully install or not fail when it reaches 99% of the way. I know I’m not alone in that one. Anyway, I was running my usual command line stuff and checking for updates and of course there were a few. Again, not shocked since it has been quite a hot minute since I touched the laptop. Ran the update and waited.

Patiently.

And patiently.

Patiently waited for it all to finish downloading so it could then install those updates. It finally did and then I ran the reboot command. Why? Because it was a kernel update.

Yay!

I rejoiced at the fact it was going to be using a new kernel. The reason I was pretty happy was because there three that are installed. Two as sort of a backup option and the latest. At the time of writing this out those are:

kernel-core-6.4.14-200.fc38.x86_64
kernel-core-6.4.15-200.fc38.x86_64
kernel-core-6.5.7-200.fc38.x86_64

Yeah, you can see the latest is quite a leap from what the previous one was.

I logged in and tried to finish up the updates. That didn’t really happen because as it turns out the network card wasn’t active. Weird. So, I check to see if it at the very least it does detect it and sure enough it does. Strange. What next?

Well, I naturally do the one thing we all do. Cry for a bit and then search for possible solutions. Ok, that’s a big fat lie because we don’t all search. So I see there are a few ways of resolving my issue and most require having an internet connection which I don’t have on the laptop. There goes that.

So what next?

I boot back up to the previous kernel (6.4.15) and run flatpak updates. Wait for those to finish. Reboot.

The logon screen shows up and I chose a different session to use. I look at the internet connection and this time it was detected and connected. What?? Like how? I never did anything beyond the updates and reboot.

So rebooted again and logged in the same way I had before. Everything is now working as expected which, you know what, I’m not even mad. It was more funny in the end since I really have no idea what happened or what caused the network card to not work the first time around. All I know is that I have a working laptop again and can finish learning the things I wanted to learn on the networking course I started and then can make progress on other courses I want to take.