Oh cool!

Seeing your affinity for nix, I’d go with nixos, either it is on the raspberry or a laptop, and then boot into sway, then have it open the terminal on boot, kitty, or another similar terminal.

Id probably hyper focus on making the perfect nixos config, I’m unsure if I would want to have it part of my main flake or a separate flake

Did you make that TUI? Why? What does the TUI do? I’ve written TUIs using that framework before (assuming it is dialog) and the file browser I don’t like, so I always end up making my own file pickers for it.

What I would do if I needed a typewriter like device, to not be detracted by, pooh shiny thing.

I would want a bigger screen, the pi400 looks like a great choice, I agree that a mechanical keyboard would be better but what is more important, having everything in one unit, or having better parts?

What about just using an older laptop, if you have one. Install Linux, any flavor, I see you are comfortable with raspbian, so Debian, Ubuntu, mint etc should make you feel right at home. Most any other option is also fine, like fedora, or arch Linux if you want a little bit torture, or nixos if you want more pleasure and torture.

Any hardware you ended up with, any distro you ended up with. Just delete all apps that are not for your one specific need. Including the web browser!

Any desktop environment should be okay, as long as you remove all apps not for let’s say writing and file management. Optionally switch to a window manager, like i3wm, sway, or hyprland (hyprland is the first thing I’ve recommended thus far I haven’t used extensively), to make it feel more like a focused machine!

Optionally, if your text editor is terminal based (like mine, I use vim or neovim), if it helps you focus even more, just disable the display manager (the login program) so you log right into the tty. The main drawback over using a window manager like sway and a nice terminal emulator like kitty or Ghostty, is that you can’t view images or all nice effects in let’s say neovim. But this might be a plus in the end. If you don’t need emojis.

A bonus tip! If you continue with your setup like you do right now, or if you chose a window manager, or just straight tty. Use udisks / udiskie to auto mount USB drives, similar to how KDE or gnome does it.

Also for file manager i now use yazi, it’s in the terminal, will work in tty or a terminal in a desktop or window manager. There are just a couple of things I miss from my old file manager I used before called ranger, but yazi is much faster and light weight.

Also maybe use ssh to copy over your files? If you want to have network access, maybe network access is a bad idea

Wife has started to expect oversharing, she corrects me when it’s just us two, and then I am not sharing enough. When going into social situations, she reminds me of thinking about what is okay to share before I share.

I need to fidget when I have to sit and listen to things. It can seam like I don’t care about the topic, but if I am using all my focus on not fidgeting I sometimes can’t focus on what the other person is saying.

Don’t get into keyboards, I have multiple keyboards, most expensive one I spent $300 to build, the one I am using now is $150, and I have a few others in that price range, and one that is half built

I almost picked up a $60 keyboard impulse buy for my wife today. Then I thought that she is using the $300 one, but she wishes the key caps were pink, maybe $60 is reasonable just for the key caps? No stop it

Similar things like fighting sticks, I don’t want to talk about it

For paid hobbies, 3d printing isn’t that awful, as long as you learn 3d modeling while your at it. It’s a bit of a cost, after that the consumables isn’t horrible, and I can leave it for a while and come back a few times per year, and it can mix with other hobbies.

I enjoy programming! It’s free, and I can hyper focus on a programming project, and if I move on I can move on to another programming project.

I usually try to get at least a few YouTube videos in before going to bed after programming. Because if I hyper focus on programming and then go to bed, I will wake up in the middle of the night with a solution to a problem I had. While that is great fun, I have enough issues getting enough sleep as it is, don’t need to wake up at 3AM and having to get over to the computer to write down an algorithm or something, then test it, then post about it online because I am so happy and proud and can’t get back to sleep

My brother will get into expensive stuff, and then he can’t finish what he starts, and his hp proliant server is still collecting dust in his spare bedroom.

My father would have projects that he needed to take up additional mortgages for, like buying a fish selling truck (why not ice cream ffs), or a boat, or shit. Or buying farming equipment even though he has a lawn sized lawn and not a field sized lawn, or a boat or shit.

To be fair, (I hate Nintendo because of their crusade on open source software), but to be fair,

ps2 had issues on some Ps1 games, the list is short though, and the last few revisions of ps2 even software emulated Ps1 (don’t know the compatibility difference with hardware backwards compatibility)

Ps3 had issues with even more ps2 games, and only the first few revisions had hardware backwards compatibility, the ps2 emulation on ps3 without hardware compatibility is a mess

PS5 has issues with some ps4 games, including but not limited to psvr games, and I think I saw an official in incompatibility list by sony

Wii backwards compatibility i dont know about any issues except with games that use hardware accessories, maybe someone knows more? Later revisions dropped backward compatibility, but the hardware is still present, and homebrew will help you.

As for switch 2 to switch 1 backwards compatibility speculation, here is a educated guess. The asterisk is referring to lobo games and some other games with accessories. Why this speculative conclusion? Because of the way the hardware inside it works.

The arm cpu can be optionally designed to be completely backwards compatible. But is it? (more on that soon). The gpu part of the SOC, is most certainly not 100% binary compatible, because of what we already know about the architecture changes between these gpu generations. This isn’t limited to arm and nvidia gpus, ps5 also has these issues with x86 jaguar to ryzen, and Radeon generations.

So what about your experience with pc gpus, and cpus, and ps5 to ps4 compatibility etc? Well, emulation, the instructions, that are not compatible are emulated in software, this is common place, and in practice it works quite well. The main issue comes down to timing. Some things take different amount of time to do, like an instruction can take fewer cycles. Or if it’s emulated it can take more cycles. Emulation does work well, even if it often can have timing issues. Some times instructions from a future generation can possibly be emulated on your pc cpu. I can remember my friends computer using an installed windows driver, to emulate a future version of the SSE instruction set, I think it was SSE 2 or 2.1, it worked well enough to play VR games (oculus rift dev kit 1 days).

Another issue is that when cpu makers deprecate instructions some times, but they do this in a quite annoying way, they can add a wait, so an instruction takes much longer to run than previous cpus.

I’m not confident enough to talk in this detail about GPUs, because as we all experience, the high level compatibility api like directX or vulkan do all this all the time for us, and I don’t know graphics programming. But I do know this is more of an issue on consoles talking more directly to the hardware. But lots of switch games use vulkan so, those should TM work fine… But some games can also be programmed (intentionally like rogue squadron on GameCube, or unintentionally) to need an unintended or undocumented feature of the vulkan implementation on the switch, and those may or may not work on switch 2

Nvidia also is responsible for the Cpu design, directly or indirectly. I don’t know how much they care about being as backwards compatible with the cpu instructions as possible though. Probsbly if Nintendo has anything to say about it, they can be 99.999% compatible, with only some timing issues, which may or may not affect games.

So what is the conclusions? Of course this is speculation, and users have to test games, it will take years to know the full extent, but I think we will see near 100% compatibility for games that don’t need hardware accessories that are not compatible. If we exclude shovelware (low effort crap that somehow got into the eshop) maybe a couple to a handful of games will have big enough issues that they can’t be played. Maybe more games will have minor graphics issues, or things that look fine, but just slightly different to switch1

But code subject to copyright (which I agree with the concept of but it needs a reform). While concepts and ideas in computer programs and games can be patented (which I think is tremendously stupid)

Can you explain? I wish this was true but I don’t believe it

Wait raffi’s albums are intended for children?

Yes boss! And PLA can be smoothed using clorophorm. Another solution not to handle without safety training

You can smooth PETG with Methylene Chloride, but I would not suggest handling things without proper training and knowledge first

Nixos

Jokes on you, because just that you learned to read analogue clocks, makes your brain more plastic. I am sure you know what that word means, but for anyone else, plastic means adaptable. The more things you learn the easier it is to learn more things.

You sound like someone who doesn’t know how to read an analoge clock.

I bet you could figure it out if you looked it up. And you would be better for it ❤️

To be fair, this is my experience in academic computer science also

Edit: didn’t click the link before commenting, this is referencing what universities already teach

Got to make sure it’s not behind the refrigerator, just to get the possibility out of your mind, so you can focus on other places it may be

The rare resources were not uncovered on the map before the technologies to use them were researched

I used to use i3 as my main desktop, now I run sway. But I haven’t installed i3 or sway on the steam deck. Mainly because I have spent years perfecting my i3wm config, used days converting it over to sway, then used months tweaking it. And I just don’t want to do that again on my steam deck.

But here is what I would try if I didn’t have two kids and lots of responsibilities.

I’d try installing sway, or i3wm if I couldn’t get that going in an arch Linux distrobox. Arch Linux just because I am familiar with it, and it’s very maluable. Pick which you are most familiar with if you want. And then I would launch that as a non steam app.

Then what I am dredding the most comes next. Configuring the window manager. I’d take my current sway config, or my current i3wm config and just rip out what is not needed. And plan and craft keybinds together with a steam input configuration… I think it would be possible to make a very comfortable and usable configuration.

the main thing I think valve should do to make desktop more usable is to detect when a keyboard input is in focus and show the on screen keyboard automatically. And also show move it to the top if it means you would see the text input field. Or maybe use some gamescope magic to move the viewport you are looking at the desktop so that you always can see the text input. Or some apps like terminal emulators would have to be resized.

It won’t be perfect, at least without improvements to gamescope. But it can be quite interesting

Native vulkan or opengl games doesn’t need to translate thees calls, if directx could run. Natively on Linux, it wouldn’t have to be translated

No

Yes