Not many… but this community isn’t for those people. It’s for people who are already predisposed to self-hosting software.

Couldn’t the same be said for just about any self-hosted app? You can watch video files with a local video player, so no need for Jellyfin; you can save passwords in KeePass, so no need for Vaultwarden; etc.

Seems to me like, if you’d like to have access to this app along with your data from any computer without having to overlay a separate data syncing solution and install a local app on each of those computers, that’s justification enough. Or maybe I’m just not understanding your critique here…

Ah, true! Unfortunately for the anonymous LLM whose reputation is at stake, this was something like a platformer.

I found a review summary that said the background music in the game made it difficult to see enemies and that I should turn down the BGM track to fix it. 😆

Another frequent transit user here. When people complain that I’m early for something, I like to tell them that, since I ride transit, my choices are to be early or late, but I can’t choose to be on time. 😅

I’m running this. There are a few things I don’t like about it. The biggest issue for me is that it touts itself as a privacy-centric file converter, but then it makes requests to Google Fonts and Cloudflare. I’ve blocked loading of those scripts in my browser, but I don’t understand why you would add those things to a service that’s supposed to be focused on privacy.

The other issue I had is that the default video conversion server URL is baked into the Docker image. Whereas normally I would configure something like this by simply passing an env var through to the container, here I have to build my own image which makes updating the container more of a hassle.

Seems to be fine as a file converter though.

This may be a controversial inclusion, and it’s based on my relatively unsophisticated understanding of Linux. I believe the reason casual computer users hate Linux (generalizing here) is that “Linux” is not one thing.

Commercial operating systems are monoliths. Windows 11 is Windows 11. macOS is macOS. Apart from a few surface-level settings, all instances of them are the same. If you know how to use that operating system, you can go to almost any computer running that OS and start using it, just like you use the one you have at home.

“Linux” is entirely modular. There’s no single thing called “Linux.” You can pick and choose each component to build up your own customized OS from the ground up, and distros take advantage of this. I know just within my household, I have three Linux systems, and casual usage varies wildly across the three. One is a SteamDeck, which is a different kind of thing, but if I just take the two computers as an example, on one, you have an application menu in the top left where the other has an application menu in the bottom left. Also, those menus look completely different. That alone is enough to frustrate a casual user. Now take the fact that they each have different settings panels, different bundled apps, etc. and you have a recipe for making users always feel lost when moving from one system to another.

I don’t think this means you need to teach how to use every available desktop environment, window manager, or sound settings panel, but I do think it would be useful to introduce this concept as part of your curriculum. The sad part is that I think a lot of your audience will tune out at this point because they never had to know that on the commercials OSes, but I think it’s important to be forthcoming about it rather than having your audience blindsided by it.

If I tap-and-hold the image of an image post and tap “Share image,” it shares the image with a URL, which in Signal results in a message containing only the URL. If I use the share button instead of tap-and-hold+share, it shares the actual image. Why are the behaviors different? Why would sharing an image ever lead to anything happening other than just sharing the image?

This is Voyager, btw.

Skate Story was a real trip. I love the surreality of the thing. It may be my favorite skateboarding game apart from Tony Hawk.

I’m on a much weirder setup than you’re proposing — Bazzite Linux with a Pico 4 connected wirelessly via ALVR — and it mostly just works. I had to jump through a few hoops to get everything working to start, mostly related to tweaking wireless and audio configuration, but these are things I doubt you’ll encounter at all with an Index. I haven’t tried a game yet that doesn’t work. I mostly just care about Beat Saber and a couple of others, but they’re all working well. I’ve even bought a few new games since switching to Linux, and I can’t recall any I’ve tried that don’t work, out of maybe a dozen or so total I’ve tried. I suspect you’ll have a much smoother experience with the Index.

I’ve tried a few of these, and I’ve never found one that doesn’t feel like I’m inviting a sales rep to live on my home server. They’re technically open source, but it’s obvious their primary purpose in this form is to upsell you. I understand it, but it’s just not what I want so I’ve ended up getting rid of each one after tinkering with them for a while.

I guess the same could be said for n8n, but I find it more tolerable. I have set up a Valkey instance though and use it for persistent storage through n8n’s Redis support. That works well enough for my fairly limited use case.

I’m using ALVR with a Pico 4 headset on Linux, and it’s pretty solid. I’m not playing a ton of VR games, but so far I haven’t found anything that doesn’t work. It has some quirks, but it works pretty well. I’m very happy with it.

I moved from the city I grew up in and gave away my car on the way out. That was in 2017, and I haven’t owned a car since. I drive extremely rarely — used to rent a car for a few hours every couple of months to run this or that errand in the Pacific Northwest US. I’ve since moved to a larger city with better transit on the US east coast. I live in the center city and can’t imagine any reason I would need to drive at this point. It’s been a few years since I’ve driven a car.

How practical it is will depend heavily on your lifestyle and where you live. If you’re in most parts of the US, the default assumption is that you will drive a car, and you will be excluded from many things if you don’t. If you already live in a place that is conducive, are willing to move to a place that is, or can otherwise structure your life in such a way that doesn’t require it, you can absolutely do it. There are certainly trade-offs, but you couldn’t pay me enough money to go back to a car-centric life.

I emailed support about this, and they replied telling me they had adjusted some configuration to try to fix the problem. Seems like it was an unintended result of some other change.

Awesome! Subscribed!

Sure thing! What’s your static site generator?

Great site!

Would you ever consider adding RSS? I’d love to subscribe to a feed.

These are the dongles that came with the keyboards, so they’re paired out-of-the-box (although I have also used the process for re-pairing them). They are just connected to a USB port on the computer, so not really permanent, but I do leave them connected. Not both at the same time, but each in turn. Hope that answers your question, but I’m not 100% sure I understood it.

Since posting this, I’ve also tried installing powertop and checking the tunables. According to lsof -t, the dongle is connected directly to the root hub (under only xHCI host controller). I noticed in powertop that those controllers were still under power management, so I disabled them. That didn’t seem to help. The keyboard still lost connection.

Thanks for taking a look. Nothing in dmesg. I’m using the keyboard wired at the moment. That top entry happened when I disconnected USB. I flipped to 2.4GHz and tested the OS key which worked. Tested it periodically until it didn’t work but there were no additional log entries. The rest of the log entries happened when I reconnected USB.

[Mon May 26 11:07:31 2025] usb 1-12: USB disconnect, device number 8
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: new full-speed USB device number 10 using xhci_hcd
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: New USB device found, idVendor=fffe, idProduct=0082, bcdDevice= 1.07
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: Product: M67
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: Manufacturer:  
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.0/0003:FFFE:0082.0017/input/input46
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] hid-generic 0003:FFFE:0082.0017: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Keyboard [  M67] on usb-0000:00:14.0-12/input0
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] hid-generic 0003:FFFE:0082.0018: hiddev96,hidraw1: USB HID v1.11 Device [  M67] on usb-0000:00:14.0-12/input1
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input47
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 System Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input48
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 Consumer Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input49
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input50
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] hid-generic 0003:FFFE:0082.0019: input,hidraw2: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [  M67] on usb-0000:00:14.0-12/input2
[Mon May 26 11:14:02 2025] input: input-remapper   M67 Keyboard forwarded as /devices/virtual/input/input51

Are there other logs that would be good to check?