So what? They were okay with wearing glasses anyway.

If someone other than Microsoft managed it, it might have gone farther, honestly. Nobody kills a good idea as efficiently as Microsoft.

Well x11 was built from the ground up to solve this exact problem. Wayland was built for a more direct use case, then had to backpeddle when they realize that’s not the only way to use a computer so they either adapt or create and maintain a second stack.

Wayland is striking a pretty responsible balance here. Compositors are taking a bit to settle down on this bit it’s there. Wlroots and gnome had it best but KDE recently made enough improvements that I consider this matter settled from their side too. Cosmic, budgie, etc will be in limbo for a while.

Anyway I found out a method that works and it’s actually surprisingly clean and versatile. I just need to document and deploy. Expect a write up. I’m pretty pleased with my findings so far. There’s some old-world Linux ideas that worked really well here.

Sunshine has some documentation gaps that are annoying to figure out but there enough there you can get it done with some effort. Moonlight feels really crunchy though. Edges are rough and it always felt unfinished. I really think selkies v2 is going to kill it.

Sunshine+moonlight is better for an app based deployment, like set top boxes without web browsers. But if you have a browser available on the client, I can see some crazy possibilities with selkies.

Gamesonwhales solves the sunshine multi user issue in a different way. It’s better for renting out your box as a node for cloud gaming. It’s damn near turnkey for that and super clever. But that’s not what I’m trying to do here so it’s just adding complexity.

Wolf has opinions I disagree with. I could wrestle with containers OR look at the recent advances in Wayland, KDE (catching up to GNOME on this one for once) and classic Linux multiseat was easier than taming container security.

Wolf is better with temporary bring up and tear down. Honestly, probably not going to beat it there. But I want reusable instances and containers are needlessly complex for that.

Anyway, I got the last part of this solved this afternoon. Expect a how-to once I put it on the target system and confirm this process works there as well as my test rig.

the physical display output is claimed by something else totally separate.

Anyway I did figure out how to the headless backend working, but I did not figure out the udev rules for this headless session

Allows Sunshine to access /dev/uinput

KERNEL==“uinput”, SUBSYSTEM==“misc”, OPTIONS+=“static_node=uinput”, GROUP=“input”, MODE=“0660”, TAG+=“uaccess”

Allows Sunshine to access /dev/uhid

KERNEL==“uhid”, GROUP=“input”, MODE=“0660”, TAG+=“uaccess”

Joypads

KERNEL==“hidraw*”, ATTRS{name}==“Sunshine PS5 (virtual) pad*”, GROUP=“input”, MODE=“0660”, TAG+=“uaccess” SUBSYSTEMS==“input”, ATTRS{name}==“Sunshine X-Box One (virtual) pad*”, GROUP=“input”, MODE=“0660”, TAG+=“uaccess” SUBSYSTEMS==“input”, ATTRS{name}==“Sunshine gamepad (virtual) motion sensors*”, GROUP=“input”, MODE=“0660”, TAG+=“uaccess” SUBSYSTEMS==“input”, ATTRS{name}==“Sunshine Nintendo (virtual) pad*”, GROUP=“input”, MODE=“0660”, TAG+=“uaccess” SUBSYSTEMS==“input”, ATTRS{name}==“Sunshine PS5 (virtual) pad*”, GROUP=“input”, MODE=“0660”, TAG+=“uaccess”

this is…not enough

nope I got around that. I don’t need video, just the render node. dma-buf pulls it from render to encode without passing through the CPU or system ram.

now I just need to figure out the udev multi seat crap. seats expect physical hardware to be assigned to them.

that won’t work. that only applies to X11. Wayland doesnt work that way.

I would need to use the headless backend in kwin, which apparently isn’t something you can do from start plasma-wayland but you can do with kwin_wayland --virtual -s waylandR. I can give it a specific socket (waylandR) which lets me point sunshine at that, but I cannot get moonlight to accept a PIN that way. it seems mad about this setup and I’m not sure why.

What problem is this trying to solve?

Keep a windows VM available with Boxes.

It broke legacy hardware compatibility. Sorry I should have been more specific. They need to maintain software compatibility.

Someone was censoring Lemmy by using their tech to decide who gets a voice and who doesn’t.

It’s like a mod tried to turn Lemmy into an HOA.

Enforcement is for inconvenienced rich tech companies.

Linux can be made to do those things too. That’s a management issue. Head office is dumb and doesn’t know what they are doing and they make that your problem.

As for the CNC, aren’t those all some variation of GRBL anyway? I feel like there’s a major disruption opportunity for retrofitting a more standard control system onto existing CNC machines. Something supported by Linux/bsd/temple/whatever. The CNC machines are technological anchors for any shop and honestly they don’t need to be. They aren’t as complex as people think.

Honestly there are some things I feel Microsoft and Apple do still do better and since they are UI-first considerations, Linux will likely never keep up.

For example: Apple has app packages. Imagine a flat pack to install by just dragging into a folder. Thats it all dependencies are there in the package. When you double click, the default action is to run a predefined binary within the package. It’s basically a folder whose default action is launch a binary within rather than open and browse. If you want to uninstall, just drag to trash. The OS keeps receipts and when I sees a package is sent to the trash, it handles the cleanup for you.

Flatpaks kind of do this but not really. It’s really clever and there’s no reason Linux can’t do this other than it just doesn’t face the same design pressures Apple did when they made it. Apple was GUI first, Linux had a GUI as an afterthought.

Microsoft has the plus of turn it on and it’s already there. Anymore, that’s pretty much all it has. Linux is getting much better with easier to use graphical installers and pushing themselves into a system much faster than windows does. But if a user doesn’t understand how a computer boots, that they can tell the computer to just boot something else, it’s overwhelming to get to the Linux-is-easy part. I feel like there should be a single click installer that creates a recovery partition, tells the uEFI to boot into it, wipes the original windows partitions out and installs to the computer, then removes itself, lets Linux reboot and reclaim the entire drive with a partition resize.

Windows has different design pressures. They have painted themselves into a corner and can no longer afford to manage it. If they make sweeping changes they break the number 1 rule of windows, maintain legacy compatibility wherever possible. If companies have to buy new, it’s a harder sell for Microsoft because there are better, cheaper options out there they can’t compete with. Their own ecosystem is holding them back and they cannot do anything about it.

To be fair, windows 8 was great at what it was designed to do: make a touch friendly UI for doing actual work, which iPad couldn’t really do at the time. Apple has since copied the best ideas Microsoft demoed back then in win 8. But Microsoft mismanaged the project and shoehorned that UI into everything and ruined it.

Microsoft can do amazing things, even now. They just cant manage themselves out of a paper bag. When they try something new, they generally come up with some impressive shit. But then it gets handed off to the shareholders goons to mismanage and weaponize. So the metro UI went from a problem solver to a punishment.

I left windows years ago and have been splitting the difference between Mac and Linux since.

I’ve been working on moving off Mac too. The current beta is a speed demon (seriously impressive compared to Tahoe) but it’s still just a faster set of things I’ve come to hate. They are not even trying to solve a problem with their changes anymore. They are just selling things they have decided I must have.

Remember when Siri just used wolfram alpha for everything and was loaded with Easter eggs? Now we have an invasive AI nobody asked for and all efficiency gains get wasted on horseshit.

Fedora workstation with KDE.

Took like 10 minutes dude.