I wore a Pinetime for a while, sadly the touchscreen can’t beat the Pebble’s buttons. I’d buy a Pinetime with buttons and a non-touch reflective LCD in a heartbeat though! I was looking at BangleJS or Watchy as replacements but I’m really unsure about the durability and how usable they’d be (I need just the time and notifications, maps/navigation is a big plus tho).

A good 90% I’d say. All my devices run Linux (NixOS laptop, Ubuntu server, LineageOS phone).

Non-FOSS stuff:

• AMD GPU in my Framework 16 laptop means the only unfree package on my laptop is Steam.
• The proprietary apps I do run on my phone are TooGoodToGo and my bank as I’m not aware of alternatives.
• I wear a Pebble Time Steel smartwatch, also not aware of any alternatives.
• PS5 controller firmware has no replacement.

I don’t browse the surface web a lot and when I do I tend to disable JS, so I avoid most of the nonfree JS. I have no social media accounts besides Mastodon, Matrix, and Lemmy, which are all free :)

As an extension, all my close family runs Linux on their computers, as it ended up being lower maintenance than setting them up with Windows when time came to upgrade.

You can kinda get autofill via a program called rofi-rbw on Wayland desktops (using wtype), but I found at least on Hyprland it often misses the field or the start of the password. I’d like to see a more consistent solution but definitely not via the official Electron app…

Thanks, I can’t think of it as anything but duke nukem forever now. Your comment made my day.

Wow yeah, your position sounds awesome. I guess if I were in an indie studio I could be in charge of the engine or like, dev environments. I’ve found such benefit in doing gamedev on Linux, even if targeting Windows via cross-compiling, it’s so much faster and nicer. But what company would be willing to hire an intern to move over their whole workflow… not happening lol.

I am very serious about using Linux exclusively. I have ported/rewritten all of my university’s course materials in my past two years of gamedev studies and made them available for others. But the time has come to do an internship and I have yet to find a single studio I could be at while still using Linux. I feel like I reached a dead end tbh

This is a good option for most of it, as the bridges seem quite solid. Sadly it won’t make up for calls (some courses have extra content in the form of “Discord Stages” which is like a big video call).

I can echo the frustrations expressed about social media becoming a necessity as it becomes the primary channel for communication by an institution. Both my university and student dorm use exclusively Discord to communicate events, exams, and general announcements. I don’t run Discord on my phone and due to this I have come close to missing several important things, if not for a friend letting me know. I’m not sure what if anything could be done to change this…

Awesome news! Really miss the tab groups from Chrome, really the only thing haha

Thank you so much :D I had a lot of fun with that one; happy you liked it.

Yep! You can just paste the URL of the blog into your reader (or try https://blog.allpurposem.at/feed/ if that doesn’t work).

I’m using a reMarkable Linux tablet and it’s been awesome. There’s a bunch of apps ported to it if you’re okay with using an older software release, and they give you full root access. Not FOSS or open hardware like Pine64 but really good experience and does not feel too limited.

Can’t hurt to do a little self-promotion ey? I recently started writing https://blog.allpurposem.at/minecraft-qr about FOSS stuff I work on and ways I’ve managed to survive my gamedev degree on Linux. Aiming for one post per month, though my next one is taking a bit longer.

I set up Arch manually, following the ArchWiki guide. Over time using it though, I must have made some customizations that were incorrect and caused it to break.

I ran my own Mastodon for a while. While it does work, it takes up a ton of storage (every image and video you see is cached by your own server). It also doesn’t work great for viewing stuff like replies and older posts, since backfilling is still not a thing. I ended up just browsing on remote servers instead. A great blog post about this: https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/11/some-notes-on-mastodon/

A Hat in Time!!! That’s awesome, I remember having crashes with the proprietary drivers. Looking forward to playing this wonderful game on NVK.

I use this and love it! I can’t remember whether it was a “FairEmail Pro” feature though (one-time donation to unlock pro features). Regardless it works great.

Cool! Might make me reconsider the next laptop I get. The all-AMD Zephyrus G14 I currently run has been an awful experience (overheating after 15min of gaming, random iGPU freezes, fTPM stuttering, no video accel on Wayland, HDMI is broken, wifi randomly stops working, and mic disappears on 99% of boots), and I was looking to replace it with an Nvidia laptop, but maybe Tuxedo can fix these issues on their own hardware and make AMD viable.

I really, really hope this leads to development of data portability/server migration options. When I set my homeserver up, I chose Synapse as I didn’t know about the other servers. Now that I do, and would like to switch away because of Synapse’s performance problems and the new CLA stuff, I realize I and all my users are fully locked in, and would have to start from scratch (lose all chats, profiles, etc) to migrate.

I held on to my Time Steel for so long, but I finally switched to AsteroidOS on a Huawei Watch. No AOD, way too bright with lights off and unreadable in the sun, and have to charge it every night (barely lasts a day). I’m heavily considering going back.