Thanks for this, I’m impressed by Bambus’ quality but I’ve always been highly suspect of the true cost of their “turnkey” operation and appliance-like nature.

It was making me sad seeing people just recommending them left and right even though it seemed like a huge step backward from all the hackerspace community-spirit innovation we’ve been seeing with 3D printing.

I’m really glad to see people pushing against that and advising people to consider the ramifications. <3

Yeah those apps are predatory. Good call.

I’m praying for you there, friend. This is really sad seeing what’s happening to human relationships. It’s very INhuman.

The best thing you can do is be your best, genuine self, and go engage in what’s left that other people do together. Meetups, volunteering, interests, hobbies, social book clubs, whatever.

Don’t think about “dating” like “trying to score a wife.” Be your very best self and find a person with a mutual interest in being very best friends forever with you, and then see if romance can bloom from there.

An innocent shared coffee laughing about favorite movies is WAY less pressure than some formal “date” where two strangers dance around awkwardly feeling each other out for “flags” and sidestepping “deal breakers”.

That’s my 2¢ anyway. I hope you find genuine connection. :)

all that swiping and trying to maximize compatibility. People are people not clothing or toys.

Exactly, all these apps need the user to be self absorbed. “Who’s YOUR right fit? Who is YOUR type? Who fits YOUR personal fantasy narrative?”

Love is about two people giving themselves toward each other, not obsessing over their “ROI” in some transactional economic thinking. But that simply doesn’t compute to a CEO and natural human friendship doesn’t return 4x to investors every quarter, so it’s gotta go, right?

Building a relationship should be out of interest in the other soul, and finding that person isn’t what these algorithms promote. They turn dating into just another job hunt with metrics to meet, a “market” of desirability, bullshit interviews, performative fakery, marketing, and ego.

I also met my partner online, but ~20 years ago on World of Warcraft LOL. Younger people ask me for dating advice and I’m like “Stay off those stupid apps and just go meet people who might like what you like and see what happens!”

Well, I heard a big goal of every app these days is to get whales… Maybe this is what they meant? O.o (/jk)

I want to see open source printer devices doing this.

I couldn’t care less about Bambu Lab, if anything they irk me because they’re driving 3D printing towards a “the magic black box just works until it doesn’t and then we throw it in a landfill and buy a brand new one.” model.

Sure thing! So glad I could be helpful! :D

I don’t blame you. It’s the only thing I’m keeping a Win10 dual-boot for right now, and to their credit, it does work quite well in Windows. We’ve had a ton of fun with our set.

In the meantime, I’m keeping up with the project but not actively tinkering with it myself, because it’s exciting but also not quite there yet. It’s at least given me hope that it can be done though! I’m confident we’ll see significant gains sooner rather than later. Hats off to them. (Once my income stabilizes I’ll gotta pitch them some funds…)

Envision has made it VERY convenient to get set up, but the whole process still saps more time than “Fire it up and play.” So maybe play with it at some point, but either way definitely keep your ear to the ground. :)

I’m hoping in the future we’ll get to use it for things like Godot XR or Blender integration. :D

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 don’t forsee it becoming “sentient” so much as “Being given a stupid amount of access and resources to figure out a problem by itself, and stupidly pursuing the maximization of that goal with zero context.”

There’s that darkly humorous hypothetical that an Ai tasked with maximizing making paperclips would continue to do so, using every resource it could get a hold of, and destroying any threat to further paperclip production!

So that, with data center expansion and water. Lol

See “paperclip maximizer” under “hypothetical examples” Here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence