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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 10th, 2023

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  • At least FFB for my basic saitek gamepad works out of the box in proton games and even in some emulators like dolphin. Haven’t had steering wheels or pedals but always wanted. They are surely a different beast to reverse engineer. I have no doubt racing gear manufacturers will increasingly take care of linux compatibility with the momentum in linux gaming. And then there are all these OSS wizards already working on the most exotic HW. SteamDeck I don’t know. I don’t see that many linux steamers sadly.

    I’m a bit of a reverse engineer myself (insert william dafoe meme) and had a successful pull request for controlling rgb lighting on my headset. Nothing compared to steering wheels or the like but I never did reverse engineering before and knew just a little C and it worked and was fun. Thing was I needed Windows to monitor the USB data when switching stuff in the OEM software.



  • Windows 7 is yolo for a business. Support ran out in January 2023. But I guess it’s some hardware it needs to support, right?

    Had that for a few years in my life too. The enterprise ran on Windows Server, MS Dynamics, MS VPN, Exchange etc. and the Dynamics Server could not be upgraded for years because so much depended on it. It was a tremendous effort to do it at the end.


  • I already used QEMU which was a heck more complicated than VirtualBox, although I got MacOS Big Sur running with acceptable speed at the end. Sadly no-joy with NVidia single GPU passthrough in the apple garden. But I plan to do it for Windows 10 because I want that fucking 1TB NVMe that the big ass of my Windows install is hibernating on for the second year.

    What GPU are you using and if it’s Nvidia, was it difficult to enable?



  • AFAIK the Same situation with KDE Connect which I couldn’t properly exist without. Also KRunner & Dolphin. Kate would be possible but hard AF.

    Full on agree with KRunner. One of the MVP applications of KDE. So far none of the alternatives I tried on Windows 10 and MacOS come anywhere close to its power and elegance. Maybe Alfred which I tested years ago.

    I could write 10 more paragraphs about why KRunner is one of the most advanced laucher/search/command application but I think everyone should experience it themselves. Best not to over-do it with the KRunner-plugins where an overwhelmingly long search result list could ruin your experience.


  • I went to MS forums for remembering how to write “sfc /scannow”, “Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth”, because it was often the first answer on a post. How-To’s concerning “bootrec” and “diskpart” were always to be found somewhere else. At least with sfc and dism it was always pray and hope it does something useful under the hood.

    With an unbootable Linux partition (which seldomly happens) I mount it, chroot it and then have a plethora of fixes I can try, tools I can use and logfiles I can check instead of putting my self in the hands of 2-3 blackbox-apps. Manual fixing under Windows is possible but nobody can tell me it’s feasible with the repair console.


  • If it’s RGB stuff OpenRGB is a revelation. For mouses try Piper which is great too. Both unify the configuration of a lot of different brands in professional grade FOSS applications. There’s also the commandline app Headset-Control for which some small GUI frontends exists.

    Know nothing about graphic tablets, trackballs or steering wheels but I heard from good experiences. When it comes to VR though…


  • I was in an IT school around 2012. I thought I was the only one using Linux besides Windows (predominantely though). I wasn’t. He was daily-driving Gentoo where most of the students haven’t even heard of Linux the kernel before confronted with a bash shell in a course.

    I’d say in 2000 only the nerdiest people, academics or professionals knew the difference between say Red Hat or Gentoo at least here in Central Europe. Windows 95 (and 98) came pre-installed on every OEM PC and the best windows to that date (2000) would come out that year and I guess everybody was hyped for XP. Saying you are compiling your kernel and software yourself with GCC would have only got you puzzled faces instead of kudos in 2000 here.


  • Used archinstall too 3 years ago, btw. The result is still running with no noticeable performance degradation if not rather performance improvements. Games continue to get snappier and look better, I find.

    Also it’s stable af. Can coun’t on one hand where I had to intervene on OS updates. On those only one case where I had a terminal after reboot. All were resolved within an hour or so. Driver updates for nvidia just run through. The only time I had to mess with them was when Valve rolled out Steam’s new UI. That’s when I learned about Arch’s downgrade mechanism.

    Did 2 manual i3 installs with BIOS boot mode and GRUB before I started using archinstall. I would bitterly fail with manually installing ESP/GPT/UEFI, Dual- and SystemD-boot, KDE, BTRFS, PipeWire. Used archinstall on a few PCs now and had 1 out of 4 where it wouldn’t install. On the 1 archinstall-fail an EndeavourOS Jellyfin/Emulationstation is alive and rocking now.

    Ubuntu, Mint or Fedora might be better for beginners than Arch-based but a colleague without prior linux knowledge installed it himself for work and seems to have no problems. The welcome dialogue with update-starter and notifier, package cleaner, arch news reader, nvidia-installer, logviewer, mirror ranking, and links to relevant topics is good stuff. IMO they should pre-install Octopi or Pamac instead of their rudimentary graphical package manager. Endeavour is as stable as Arch so far.

    Edit: exchanged PulseAudio with PipeWire which is even better ofc