Hmmm, I wonder how this would affect things in the future where this is widely used.

I.E. if you had both widespread solar usage and some kind of large blackout, would it be hard to get all your solar back online because it’s all in the “waiting for the grid” state? And the grid can’t come back at capacity because all the solar it’s expecting is out?

I assume people smarter than me have this figured out, but just a random thought if anyone knows more.

Maybe there’s a spare USB header inside on the board?

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It obviously depends on your exact git workflow, but my last team had things setup so that the code content of a MR was automatically squashed on merge, and the text if the MR itself was automatically set as the content of the new singular git commit.

This was largely the best of both worlds because your commits could have almost any text, and the description of what changed could be updated as needed when making the MR. But it ultimately ended up in the git history where it belonged.

Of course, I still had some trouble trying to get the team to describe their changes well in the MR at times - but that’s a different problem entirely.

Super cool project. FYI it does require converting your ebooks to a special format.

I suspected as much since it’s using an Arduino Mega - very battery efficient I’m sure, but very underpowered.

Bleh, maybe I’m an old man, but when I’m searching stackoverflow, I find the context of stack overflow answers really helpful.

I.E. the top result may include caveats itself or have comments indicating why an answer might be problematic. And sometimes the best answer isn’t even the top answer. I’ve not used AI code assistance very much, but these all seem like things that the model is likely to take for granted.

But I also never contribute to stackoverflow, and agree I’d much rather engage with with an AI than do THAT.

In fairness, my understanding is that there are a lot of complications with adding distributed power to existing grids. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen, just that there are engineering and safety challenges when power is coming from “everywhere” vs centrally.

And of course, there’s a lot of energy companies lobbying against clean power sources as well.

Curious did you get the survey popup in desktop mode on the deck? Or does it work in “big picture”?

I got the hardware survey on my Windows PC, but not on my Steamdeck. So I wonder if there is only 1 survey per user, and most people don’t use a steamdeck exclusively?

One thing you could do that I don’t see mentioned here is to install Virtual Box in Windows and create a Linux Mint Virtual Machine. It’s basically installing a computer within a computer. You should be able to find some tutorials online.

This would let you try Linux Mint in a sandbox within Windows so that you could experiment a bit with everything before changing anything.

Just keep in mind that within the VM, things will be less performant, especially graphically, and certain peripherals, etc. might not work. But it would let you test out installing the software you want, the cloud storage solution you want, browsing around, etc.

Speaking of graphics, you’ll want to do some research about how well supported your GPU is. It will almost certainly “work” out of the box, but if you want to get the most performance out of it, like Windows, you’re going to need special drivers. I’ve heard Nvidia can be a bit of a pain, but I think it varies by model.

I wouldn’t be too worried about the touch screen as that will probably work - or at least has on every laptop I’ve tried. I’ve had more issues with things like fingerprint scanners generally speaking. Definitely check out everything you can think of when you install, like Bluetooth, cameras, microphone, peripherals, etc. Oh and when using the laptop definitely manually knock yourself down out of performance mode using the upper-righthand corner in gnome. For me at least, it makes a huge difference in battery life if I’m in performance vs balanced vs power saver. Windows is better at automatically making those adjustments.

I’ve also heard that lately Microsoft is making dual-boot harder - notably that Windows updates will just casually break your dual-boot and revert it to just Windows. I don’t know the details since it’s been years since I’ve done it myself, but something to keep in mind.

Finally I’ll throw out there to make sure you have a recovery plan if the install goes south. Have all your files backed up. Have a copy of Linux and Windows installers ready. It honestly should be fine, but especially if this is your only PC you don’t want to be stuck if you have some kind of issue, accidentally blow away your laptop’s SSD, etc . Not trying to scare you or anything, but better safe than sorry, right?

More of a debugging step, but have you tried running lsinitrd on the initramfs afterwards to verify your script actually got added?

You theoretically could decompress the entire image to look around as well. I don’t know the specifics for alpine, but presumably there would be a file present somewhere that should be calling your custom script.

EDIT: Could it also be failing because the folder you are trying to mount to does not exist? Don’t you need a mkdir somewhere in your script?

It looks like there are instructions here about hosting your own flatpak instance: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/hosting-a-repository.html

I’ll just add that another, albeit smaller, category of games that don’t work are really new, demanding titles. There’s not a lot of them for now, but naturally the deck wasn’t the most powerful device to begin with and over time less titles will work well.

Starfield was pointed out to me as an example of one that can’t run on the deck for performance reasons (not that Bethesda is known for their optimization) and BG3 was only barely playable at the lowest settings in the more demanding areas of the game (i.e. Act 3).

That said, for its price point, and considering most games are using the proton compatibility later, I was actually very impressed with its performance.

I know for me, at least with gnome, toggling between performance, balanced, and battery saver modes dramatically changes my battery life on Ubuntu, so I have to toggle it manually to not drain my battery life if it’s mostly sitting there. I don’t know if Mint is the same, but just throwing out the “obvious” for anyone else running Linux on a laptop.

Found a blog post that gives a quick overview of how to do git via email in general: https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/05/09/how-to-submit-a-patch-by-email-2023-edition

So at least from my understanding you’d make your changes, email the contents of the patch to the maintainer, and then they’d apply it on their side, do code review, email you comments, etc. until it was in an acceptable state.

There’s also the full kernel development wiki that goes into all the specifics: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.16/process/howto.html

(I never got through the whole thing)

I’ll also throw out: aging infrastructure, build systems, coding practices, etc.

I looked into contributing to the kernel - it’s already an uphill battle to understand such a large, complex piece of software written almost entirely in C - but then you also need to subscribe to busy mailing lists and contribute code via email, something I’ve never done at 30 and I’m betting most of the younger generation doesn’t even know is possible. I know it “works” but I’m really doubting it’s the most efficient way to be doing things in 2024 - there’s a reason so many infrastructure tools have been developed over the years.

The barriers to entry for a lot of projects is way too high, and IMO a lot of existing “grey” maintainers, somewhat understandably, have no interest in changing their processes after so much time. But if you make it too hard to contribute, no one will bother.

I’m surprised by Helldiver’s. Has there been some performance patches? I tried playing that on my deck near launch and it really struggled even at minimum settings - I can’t imagine how it would run at higher difficulties.

This was my experience as well, though I did notice that many games did not properly isolate game saves from separate steam accounts.

Tip to any devs that might read this: organize saves based on the steam account logged in, not the user of the PC (always “deck” for the steam deck) and definitely not just a single location among the game’s data.

Simple thing, but are you sure you mounted the NFS share as NFSv4? I don’t have access to a machine to check right now, but I think it might default to mounting NFSv3, even if both sides support v4.

To add on to this answer (which is correct):

Your “of” can also just be a regular file if that’s easier to work with vs needing to create a new partition for the copy.

I’ll also say you might want to use the block size parameter “bs=” on “dd” to speed things up, especially if you are using fast storage. Using “dd” with “bs=1G” will speed things up tremendously if you have at least >1GB of RAM.