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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • Heya! Sorry for taking a minute to get back to you. :)

    1000000% with you on not giving a cent to meta or throwing out perfectly good hardware with plenty of life left!!! For real!

    So, last time I tried, VR is a little bumpy right now. I have a Samsung Odyssey+ set that’s simply fantastic…if Microsoft weren’t deliberately turning it into a paperweight.

    Wonderful strides are being made by the FOSS community however!

    It’s bumpy because a lot of VR kits’ only hope right now is a project called “Monado”

    https://monado.freedesktop.org/

    (Right now it looks like your Reverb G2 is supported!)

    I main OpenSUSE Tumbleweed these days, and I used this awesome bit of software called “Envision” that attempts to automate the “retrieve all the correct dependencies and build the thing” stuff.

    For being so early, I was very impressed, especially since I’m no pro at compiling software and navigating Git branches and stuff. This is relatively turnkey. (In a tinkery Linux way, anyway lol)

    https://lvra.gitlab.io/docs/fossvr/envision/

    (The wiki here is pretty nice!)

    I was able to get the headset to function this way, as in, fire up a game and see through it and look around, and you can enable hand tracking, which is really neat! But I struggled to actually select or interact with anything using it.

    The real tough nut to crack is the controllers, but they have made some strides there too! There’s a branch that enables controller support, but it’s VERY janky right now, like, unusuable, but it’s cool that it’s going somewhere!

    The other challenge is smoothness. Expect a little jitter here and there, it’s not so buttery smooth like it was running WMR because they did a LOT of fancy proprietary compensation and prediction code sorta stuff to make that experience work. (And to the surprise of absolutely no one, they refuse to let us folks have it.)

    For Elite or DCS, since you’d just be using mouse and keyboard or a standard controller or something anyway, the headset part MIGHT be enough for you! I’d definitely encourage you to give it a shot and have a little patience with it to see if it can be acceptable for you where it’s at right now.

    You can also get a lot of information and help in the “Linux VR Adventures” Discord. (Ugh, I know.) Link here if you’re interested. :)

    Unless you’re savvy building a bunch of stuff yourself, I’d say check out Envision first, and use that to build Monado for your Reverb and see how that works out for you.

    I hope this was helpful! :D


  • Honestly I have a ridiculous pile o’ games like a lot of us do, and I’ve yet to find something (that’s not VR) that I cannot play .

    For reference I’m running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with a 30 series Nvidia card. Wayland, two monitors, main is 144hz ultrawide 3440 x 1440, another is 1080p 60hz.

    First off there’s a few programs out there to get you “Glorious Eggroll” versions of Proton which add even more stuff Valve can’t distribute in their versions.

    This beautiful software right here looks about right: https://davidotek.github.io/protonup-qt/

    Steam works fantastically. Heck, Proton works better than native Linux builds sometimes! Deck playability is an even bigger mark of quality.

    Even EA’s silly launcher works. I got Titanfall 2 and that Sims 2 Ultimate they gave away ages ago working like butter.

    I also love actually owning my games, so I use Heroic Launcher for GoG titles.

    Oh! I even have CD games or old .EXEs windows would refuse to even install anymore! Don’t worry, Linux has got this. I use Bottles to have separate environments for those games to install to and run. Majority of the time it works great but this is where things can get iffy. But hey, Windows wouldn’t run them at all!

    Wanna know what made me switch? Vermintide 2 kept giving me BSODs in Windows 10 with some super vague error code that made me think “Oh crap, please don’t tell me my GPU is dying.”

    Nope! Linux ran it with zero probs once I fixed some small quirk to make their dumb little launcher work.

    Cherry on top? All my RGB stuff works with Open RGB or my recently retired Corsair keyboard works with “CKB Next”.

    The community has made incredible strides. My Win10 partition only exists because it has Windows Mixed Reality, which they’re abandoning. But not to fear, the Monado project is making HUGE improvements.

    Give it a shot. I think you’ll be surprised. :)


  • I will definitely say I wish encryption setup was a lot easier in Linux. Windows is like “wanna Bitlocker?” Done.

    With most Linux installers, if you’re not installing in a very default way, and clicking that box to encrypt the drive, it’s time to go seriously digging. For a while.

    I managed to encrypt a secondary drive with the same password on my EndeavourOS laptop, but I still need to enter the same password 2 times before getting into the OS.

    I consider that a feat, and I’m not touching it for fear of losing everything lol.


  • Both can be true!

    I think we need to avoid the monkey-brain tendency to want to assign tribalistic moral judgement tags based on OS usage. Rotten folks can use Linux and Windows as much as anybody else.

    High profile usage of Linux? Neat! By that guy? Bummer. Such is the duality of free choice. =\


  • Thanks for the thorough background here, because I think most people (including myself) who just ignored him this whole time aren’t seeing this whole picture.

    Like the comments above, they’re seeing what looks like a petty morality crusade years after a guy who makes stupid videos let a bad word slip, which, yeah, looks ridiculous out of context.

    PewDiePie has been a right wing fucker that has eased a shit ton of young people into the alt-right pipeline for years.

    Why am I not surprised, that this world’s definition of success always seems to go hand-in-hand with bigoted fascism?

    It’s also a very chicken-or-egg question I think. I’m genuinely curious: Do internet/podcast/streamer celebrities get their status from already being like this, and signaling the fashy bros club that they’re ready to join the “in group” , or do they get pulled and influenced into that circle because they innocently found success from stupid videos?

    Is social media influencing this directly via an algorithm that simply draws the connection between right-wing extremist ideals and capital wealth?

    I feel so tragically for young folks. So much of anything pulling for their attention anymore is a targeted psy-op to “pipeline” them into some kind of zealotous soldier or another.

    The Internet used to be about cats and gaming used to be a hobby divorced from political office except when someone tried to argue they “cause violence” every few years.


  • 100% with you on that one.

    I really enjoy the discussions here, even if it’s a little slower paced sometimes. (And I find that to be a feature!)

    I’ve come to feel that technology is for anyone , but not necessarily for everyone , at least, not all at once.

    It seems like a series of Eternal Septembers are usually coaxed along by corporate interests to spur mass-adoption for fun and profit, and the existing communities that get flooded tend to suffer for it, because there’s no time to support or acclimate the newbies to the community, and they bring their existing assumptions with them.







  • How complex is making a roll-your-own NAS?

    It really depends on what you want out of it. I personally installed ProxMox on an old gaming machine (DDR3 RAM old lol) and have an Open Media Vault virtual machine running on it with access to my ZFS mirrored pair of storage drives.

    Enabling Samba support in Open Media Vault gives you a nice little NAS. I believe it’s okay to install bare metal if you really want to also.

    It also has a nice Docker interface, so although I should probably not bundle services together so tightly, it runs things like Jellyfin for media, Paperless NGX for document storage, and NextCloud AIO for a convenient (if slightly resource-hungry) interface.

    ProxMox lets me do fun things though, like back up the VMs, spin up virtual machines for PiHole ad blocking and Klipper for controlling my 3D printer.

    My most important data gets synced to a subscription to a service called iDrive as my offsite. Pretty affordable for 5TB and my own encryption keys. :)

    I want to stress that I’m not an IT professional or anything either. If you’re reasonably comfortable with Linux and understand some basic networking, I’d say at least getting Proxmox and/or Open Media Vault up and running so you can access it on your home network isn’t too hard.

    Outside of that, and if you want HTTPS and stuff? There’s lots of guides but I would recommend using TailScale instead of opening any ports to the web.

    Sorry if this post was meandering but hope it gave you a little bit to go on! :)


  • Kinda disagree on Never Split the Difference! Listened to the audiobook of it and found it to be a good primer on the basics of negotiation, something I profoundly lacked, was never taught, and had that used against me on more than one occasion.

    Nothing mind-blowing, but for the price of free from my local library, I feel like the techniques gave me a little confidence in the process.

    I do agree that a lot of these books could have easily been WAY shorter but try to sell you on value by page count lol.






  • Hey, points for Lutris! Thanks for sharing!

    I’ve had issues in the past installing stuff with Lutris, although for advanced scenarios like using community engines and stuff, that’s really cool. I definitely have both installed on my machine for different reasons. Lutris handles EA / Origin stuff pretty well. (Titanfall 2 and Sims 2 Ultimate (not the Steam one) run beautifully on Linux, truly glorious!)

    Electron annoys me as well, but I will say that I appreciate how Heroic hooks into GoG APIs. It handles auto-updates, cloud saving, play time logging, that kinda stuff that made Galaxy decent and had a degree of convenience-parity with Steam.

    (Maybe Lutris does this too now?)

    For a complete newbie , I’d say Heroic has a bit of a smoother and expected ramp to just “Download game and run.” But if you want more control, Lutris definitely has more options!

    I also can’t recommend Bottles enough for other games that aren’t from distribution platforms. Shockingly simple.