So, slightly tangential, but I have a failed home automation project this past week.

I have been using an unofficial integration for my mini-splits for a few years. The guy who wrote it likes to disappear for 6 months at a time and it seems like it may be abandoned. It finally stopped working after a home assistant update.

I had bought some ESP based replacement dongles about a year ago and decided to finally use them. Well, not all of the features worked, so I set about writing my own firmware.

That ended up working even less well. I wasted a lot of time and effort trying to get my firmware to work before giving up and just moving to the fork of the original Home Assistant integration for the official dongles.

I hate being beholden to third party stuff like this because I have robust automation setup for my mini-splits and updates can completely break them and be a massive pain to fix.

I’m not sad I tried and failed so much as I’m just sad it didn’t work. I may try again sometime in the future.

If I had to give up either Linux or Nvidia, it’s not even a question. It’s Nvidia, and it’s not even close.

I sold my 3070 and bought a 7800xt just so I could have a smoother experience, and I wasn’t even having issues.

The fucking Okta verify app and its “cannot find trusted route to whatever” error popup that covers the approve button that cannot be dismissed except for just waiting for it to go away. Love that.

Oh! I finally got tired of swiping away the “setup express login” or whatever they call it and set it up. It’s not any fucking faster! In fact, it’s slower! It’s the same process, but now I have to also use my fingerprint at the end. And there’s enough of a lag that I often forget I have to do that so I’m starting at the login screen waiting for the approval to go through.

And, I have to use the thing twice to get on GitHub or the corporate VPN. It is so fucking tedious and stupid.

Very few gen z could even read in 2005.

A modern version of Shattered Galaxy

Same gameplay with modern graphics, QOL, and new UI.

Aphantasia. I have it, too.

That’s what Distrobox is for. It’s super useful.

Have you looked at any of the Universal Blue OSs based off of Silverblue? You can rebase to them extremely easily and try them out with no risk.

https://universal-blue.org/

All of Linux requires specialized knowledge. Immutable just takes different knowledge.

The real kicker with that is just that you can’t always just follow instructions you find online. Usually you can, as long as you’re doing them in a Distrobox, though.

I went with immutable as a newbie, and I think it’s great. It feels like getting in on the ground floor of the future.

Escalator is smart, because if it breaks, you can still walk to space.

As an elder millennial: what?

Debian sounds like a great fit for you. But it’s good to know that Universal Blue has a lot of tools available for installing and tinkering that many just don’t know about. They are extremely powerful OSs.

Who knows. People are passionate about Linux. And downvoting takes no effort. And people downvote stuff randomly.

And Homebrew. I’m a developer and I’ve done all my work just with Homebrew.

You have to reboot machines to run secure kernel code. High uptime means running outdated, vulnerable system code.

Did you ever try using Distrobox? That’s the recommended way if installing random apps.

These distros are great for beginners or less technically savvy. They’re really just harder for people who have been using Linux forever and are very accustomed to the old ways.

Immutable are the ultimate tinkerer’s distros. It’s just a different way of tinkering. True tinkering in immutable means creating your own image from the base image and that allows you to add or remove packages, change configs, services, etc.

Example: you create your own image. You decide you want to try something, but you’re being cautious. So you create a new image based on your first with your changes. You try it out and you don’t like it or it doesn’t work for some reason, you can just revert back to you other image.

Another thing worth mentioning, with these distros, you can switch between images at will. I’m new to Linux as my daily driver desktop OS, and I’ve rebased three times. It’s really cool to be able to do that.

You can install packages in immutable distros. It’s just not as easy and recommended as a last resort.

With Universal Blue (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora) you can install packages with “layering”. It’s basically modifying the image by adding packages on top of what is shipped by the distro, and those packages get added each time the image is updated.

The better, more involved solution is to create your own image from the base image. That gives you a lot more control. You can even remove packages from the base image.

Hopefully you’ve had time to read some ify the replies from the folks behind Bazzite.

I would argue that it’s not bad marketing because no one is marketing it. Universal Blue, and by extension Bazzite, is a purely FOSS, community run endeavor.

Just because cloud became an over used buzzword by tech vulture capitalists, doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to what they’re doing, and it doesn’t mean that it’s suspicious.

Universal Blue is built by good folks making good shit.

Oh hey Jorge! 👋