• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • This kind of opens up its own point: people need to accept that non-free software isn’t the devil. It actually can be really good for a community to have large entities investing real, actual USD dollars into it, and creating products and services that people want to pay for. It absolutely shouldn’t be the only option, FOSS is a beautiful thing and I love that the Unix community puts a huge emphasis on it. But, without some heavy hitters putting some money on the table, Linux/BSD will always be niche. They won’t go away, but they won’t blow up either.



  • First suggestion: commit to using Ubuntu for a set period of time. Could be a week, could be 2 hours. When you encounter issues, force yourself to stay on Ubuntu.

    What you’ll find is that at first, errors will seem like gibberish, then you’ll do some snooping online, and find out how to access some log files or poke around your loaded modules. You’ll slowly learn commands and what they do.

    Eventually, something will click, ie; “wait a minute, I just checked to see which kernel modules are loaded, and I’m missing one that was mentioned in my error, that must mean I need to load that module at boot.” You load that module, reboot, try your command again, and bam, everything works. You’ve learned how to troubleshoot an issue.

    The best way to learn Linux is to immerse yourself in it. You can’t efficiently learn German if, every time you hear a phrase you don’t understand, you switch back to English, right?




  • All I want on this Earth is a FOSS alternative to Niagara launcher. I love a simple icon/list launcher but Niagaras permission requirements are unsettling. Kvaesitso is great, and easily the most polished FOSS launcher I’ve used, but just doesn’t quite hit that mark for me. The closest I’ve found is Plasma Mobile, but I don’t feel like setting up halium just for a launcher.



  • He reviews/discusses mostly audio related tech (mainly headphones) but also dabbles in more generic mainstream tech like smartphones and laptops. The past few years he’s been expressing major frustration with the likes of Microsoft and Apple and I guess for the last few months has moved all his production over to Linux rigs, and even ditched his smart phone in favour of a modern flip phone.

    Also he has a car channel called “garbage time” and a drumming stream called “garbage stream.” Very funny guy who’s definitely worth a watch.


  • Sadly, no, the Oculus software suite is Windows only, no exceptions. If there are a couple must-plays on your list that are Oculus Store only, you’ll have to keep Windows around. Who knows, maybe someday there will be some workaround, but that’s not the case at the moment.

    The good news is, for anything that isn’t exclusive, ie on Steam or even Epic/GOG, there are options. I use a piece of software called ALVR. You install the ALVR server on your PC and the client on your Quest 2 (look into how to use Sidequest if you havent already). You launch both pieces of software, launch SteamVR on your PC, make sure the ALVR server sees it, connect the Quest client to the server, and voila, wireless PCVR on Linux. I’d say the performance is at ~85% of what you could expect on Windows natively, give or take 5 or 10% depending on your setup. By no means unplayable.

    There is also OpenComposite. I know much less about this so it would be worth doing some research, but it basically bypasses SteamVR entirely. This would be especially handy for, for example, a VR game installed via Heroic Launcher (Epic, GOG, and Amazon games), where getting a game that requires SteamVR to actually see SteamVR would be a huge headache due to the separate prefixes/wine versions. There may be a way to accomplish that, but from what I can tell, OpenComposite is specifically designed to help avoid those headaches.


  • Bought a Raspberry Pi back in 2019 or 2020 with the intention of making a little handheld emulation game console. I tried Ubuntu on it and thought it was neat enough to install on a secondary drive on my main computer to tinker with. At that point, I didn’t care so much about the FOSS/Unix philosophy, I was just fascinated by the technical aspect; my computer can run an entire other OS besides Windows, which was the only thing I knew for almost two decades.

    Now I exclusively use Linux and would only use Windows if it was an absolute necessity.


  • One crash will absolutely not make this big of an uptick. The amount of highly specialized software and hardware that is OS dependant means switching will only be possible when those companies, hell really entire industries, decide to move over to a more open standard soft/hardware setup. In this case, a crash is a big deal, but the IT teams get on it and fix it in a day or two.

    Also, certain Linux machines were affected by the cloudstrike outage. Even less reason to switch when the alternative was effected as well.