Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

Okay so, to their credit, trying to name me "the color and complexion of the earth" is kind of charming, even if it means dirt.

It's funny that the more I learn about language, even ones not sourced from humanity, the more I discover words are generally phonetic mishearings one or two layers separate from an embarrassingly literal meaning. Sort of like how rhino in Norwegian is just "nose horn".

I think that's neat.

How it started: I was a dragon (as best as I can tell), and still have those memories rattling around. Clearly, it was some epic fantasy where I was mighty and all powerful!!

How it's going: I figured out some of the language we spoke, and discovered my name literally means dirt. Also I was brownish-green, not gold. Whoops.

@Aether Also SAI should work with Proton or Wine, so that shouldn't be an issue

@Aether Tbh, I would try a live distribution of the Linux Zen kernel (Garuda is a decent choice) and see what all works. That said, the disclaimers on the surface kernel you posted are notable.

VR is less adventurous than it was a year or two ago. For your hardware, I'd expect it might work out of the box on the Zen kernel.

I will literally sit on call with you sometime if you need to build a custom kernel btw. It's not too scary, but it has knobs to know about.

@Metaph YMMV, but when I found a good creature form via VRC, the dysphoria feels stopped and moved towards wanting to be that comfy shape and be creature around people all the time.

So at least for me, the yearning was accurate and not a grass-is-greener thing.

@mawr If it's one of the x86 MacBooks, fairly easily on the standard build. But might be some special instructions for its peripherals.

ARM MacBooks should work too, though will require a bit more fiddling because of the whole endianness thing. Should work fine with Wine and Proton and whatnot though!

Update: got VR working, haptics working, and face tracking almost working over the weekend.

I did need to kernel patch (which just worked, the first try!!) and spent some time with docs for unsupported VR hardware (the big screen beyond and project babble have bad tracking support on Linux, both are C-sharp executables in a trenchcoat), but man, this is so much easier than the days of manually patching configurations everywhere or suffering, especially between GCC versions.

Decided to make the switch to Garuda instead of sticking it out on Windows 10 ESU or migrating to 11. This isn't my first time (I did the same to skip Vista way back), so I already have a general idea of what to expect!

That said, I've been very impressed how much things just work now. Proton existing as a de-facto Wine replacement makes so many things so much better. Wayland is much nicer than X11 ever was to me. Packages that include default installations for Steam, Discord, and Telegram are much nicer than having to manually enable proprietary packages then practically EULA away my soul on installing basics to my system.

The various flavors I've deployed to other machines here at the house (small servers and commodity boxes, roughly in Debian and Arch now in equal measure) also generally Just Work. This is so much better than writing awkward configuration files that were a scant prayer-riding-on-a-live-cd or shuffling through package dependency hell to keep my systems stable.

I have already run into limitations with the desktop setup (I need to kernel patch to get the Big Screen Beyond working, which thankfully I know how to do), but those have been few and far between.

I was prepared for pain and suffering to skip this cycle of Windows, so I'm... kinda shocked it all just works without a hitch? What the heck.