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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I believe Xbox One controllers work if wired or fully Bluetooth out of the box, but if you use the dongle you need some software to handle it. I use “zone”, it’s kind of a pain to set up but honestly no more than (say) the Windows software to get PlayStation controllers working.

    Protondb is primarily concerned with Proton, Valve’s customized version of Wine, so by default that means games run through Steam. (Of which there is a native Linux client.) If you want to use other games, ex ones that require EA’s launcher thing, then a tool to help make that happen is Lutris. It will help manage your games and launchers and customized Wine installs, including some automatic tweaks to make things work better (or at all). Steam gets official developer support for Linux so it’s generally the easiest experience.






  • As well as the package manager (and release type/schedule as mentioned in a different reply) you might want to look at the overall structure.

    Does the distro use selinux or app armor (you probably want at least one)? Does it follow traditional distro structure like Ubuntu/Debian or is it weird like atomic (ex Silverblue) or declarative (ex Nixos) distro? Is it a minimalist distro (Arch is the big modern one) it maximalist (Suse)? Those kinds of things can also be informative.





  • See the start of this post talking about device tree models vs boot time hardware discovery.

    There’s no reason an arm chip/device couldn’t support hardware discovery, but by and large they don’t for a variety of reasons that can mostly be boiled down to “they don’t want to”. There’s nothing about RISC-V that makes it intrinsically more suited to “PC style” hardware detection but the fact that it’s open hardware (instead of Apple and Qualcomm’s extremely locked down proprietary nonsense) means it’ll probably happen a lot sooner.


  • There’s also the fact that Arm doesn’t really work with arbitrary PC style hardware. Unless this got fixed (and there have been some pushes) you have to pretty much hard code the device configuration so you can’t just (for example) pull a failed graphics card and swap a new one and expect the computer to boot. This isn’t a problem for phone (or to an extent: laptop) makers because they’re happy to hard code that info. For a desktop, though, there’s a different expectation.

    RiscV does support this, i believe, so in that sense it fits the PC model better.