Looks cool. It reminds me an enemy from the golden age of Final Fantasy games.

Counter-argument: Earn your keep and do nothing more. Unless you have stake in the business that you’re working for you are unlikely to benefit directly from any productivity gains.

Yeah, I really missed the boat getting in on it when it was $0.00…

Now I’d better get it at $0.0 before it shoots up to $0 next year.

Commenting to mention that I’ve posted an update to this thread at the top of the OP.

Turns out the hardware is fine, and the controller seems to be working perfectly fine in game!

The issue I’m having seems to be really limited to Steam menu navigation within Bazzite’s Big Picture “Gaming” Mode.

I can live with that, for now.

They’ve released a couple firmware/steam updates for people having doubled inputs, so definitely make sure you have those all installed. A new firmware update for the controller was released last night.

I guess I’m up to date, though it’s not really clear…

The first time I plugged in the puck, Steam recognized it and prompted me to update the puck firmware. Ok, that went fine.

But then it told me to unplug the puck and plug in the controller, at which point the controller was not automatically recognized and I had no way to proceed.

I ended up quitting out of that menu and finding a button to update the controller in the general settings menu, after which that button simply disappeared (?) or something…

Under Controller>Advanced settings in steam big picture mode, you can try forcibly updating all hardwired controllers.

I’ve tried that one. You click “start” and it spins for 2-3 seconds before going right back to saying “start”. It’s unclear to me what, if anything, it does.

You shouldn’t be having any signal issues at that range, so you either have something defective or some really bad signal interference. I’m leaning towards something being defective, because my puck doesn’t have line of sight, is immediately next to a router and a bunch of bluetooth devices, and hasn’t had any connection issues. You also mentioned the issues happening while wired, which definitely suggests a controller issue and not a connection problem.

Yeah… I’ve sent in a Steam support ticket.

I’m trying to keep my cool about it, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pretty annoyed at how shoddy this thing seems to be, given my long standing support of Valve hardware, the long delays, $100 price tags, struggling to buy it immediately, and it now being sold out.

I’m sure that I’ll love it if I can get it to work, but it’s still a little frustrating that this thing doesn’t just work right out of the box.

I have a mouse and keyboard, I have other controllers. That’s not really the point.

I don’t feel that I should need to plug a separate device into my Bazzite HTPC “console” to pair my controller to the puck that it comes with. Valve have marketed this controller as a replacement for a mouse and keyboard in the livingroom/bedroom setup, right?

Yes. Updated the puck, the controller, and Bazzite. Both Bazzite and Steam on their respective Beta branches.

I think you’re probably right, but I also think selling the Machine without the Controller is an odd choice, given Valve’s bigger vision of it being a living room console.

With that said, they’ve already sold many of us a controller, so… It’s kind of a mess.

I got one at 10:05, but I really had to mash through it. It was in my cart at 9:59, but I kept getting initialization errors at the payment stage.

I should mention that I added $100 to my Steam Wallet a few days ago to make the process easier. It still sucked.

As rough as this is it wasn’t nearly as bad as my experience ordering the Steam Deck…

, she said on X.com.

If you want more than gaming (like YouTube), wouldn’t it make more sense to get a wireless keyboard with an integrated touchpad

I have one, albeit kind of a crappy one that takes forever to turn on after it goes to sleep.

Right now I have an 8bitdo controller, a Micom mini trackball (which also kind of stinks, because the ball is so light that it jumps around a lot), and a wireless keyboard. Ideally the Steam Controller would allow me to replace all 3 at the same time, especially when gaming is what my Bazzite HTPC “console” is used for the most.

$100 is steep. I’ve been exited to use this controller for my Bazzite system, and I was mentally prepared to pay ~$75 for it, but I really wasn’t expecting it to be as expensive as it is.

With that said, I’ll probably still be buying one. Because while there are other good (and cheaper) controllers out there, this is the only one with dual trackpads and that’s been designed for HTPC control.

I want

For the most part you should be able to see things across apps and servers.

For example, I’m logged into fedia.io, which runs the Mbin software, and this thread is on lemmy.world, running the Lemmy software.

It can take a while to wrap your head around all this stuff, but personally I find it really cool to be part of an infinitely scalable reddit alternative. 😄

Welcome!

Keep in mind there’s no algorithm pushing things on us here, so it’s best to seek out and subscribe to as many communities as you have interests. :) If there’s a niche community on Reddit that you miss having here, consider making it yourself. Also, the most you can post and comment the better!

One thing that’s nice about the Fediverse compared to corporate social media is that there is far less bullshit, fewer ancient reposts by people pretending to post original content, almost no AI slop, etc… It’s really nice, in my opinion. Reddit certainly has a larger quantity of stuff, but I think modernly the quality has become quite low.

Nice to have you.

Sure, but Bluesky did that by not really being federated at all, especially during the early rush.

Bluesky is certainly a step or two better than Twitter, but I would imagine it’s still de facto centralized around the main bsky.social server, as that’s what the vast majority of users are probably using.Nowadays it’s getting more federated, but it seems to still be very far behind where ActivityPub is.

So they avoided the challenges of federation by not really being federated in the first place. Mastodon doesn’t have that luxury, since it was fully federated and self-hostable from the start. There was no half step and nobody else to copy.

I’m not sure what can really be done about that; the fediverse is, by its very nature, pretty complicated. It’s at least as complicated as http or email, and those things are widely used but probably not that well understood by the average person.

I think people are accustomed to using things that they barely understand the inner workings of (car, microwave, computer, etc.) during their daily life. So, I guess my question is, to what degree do people need to know “how the fediverse works” in order to use it?

If anything, we probably have to change the way we talk about the fediverse to make it more streamlined for people. For example, instead of suggesting that people “join lemmy”, it would be better to send them directly to a specific instance that we would like to see grow.

Then there’s the friction of actually joining an instance. Some instances won’t let users view content without registering, and some require you to “apply” for registration, pending approval. Both of those things are reasonable and justifiable, but at the same time I think they do create a barrier of entry that we may not want if we are going to try to attract more users.

System76 makes PopOS and ships it on their Linux-friendly laptops and desktops.

Framework, a company that Linus is heavily invested in, also makes Linux-friendly laptops.

I’m not saying he’s doing it intentionally, or that his criticisms are invalid, but there is a basic conflict of interest there.

PopOS has been a good recommendation in the past, that doesn’t mean it’s a good recommendation right now.

The same thing is true when Linus reviews one generation of Intel CPUs well, and another generation ends up having catastrophic flaws.

The world isn’t static, things change over time.

If he had consulted a human being with a brain, instead of an LLM without one, he would probably quickly find out that PopOS just replaced their entire desktop environment and toolkit with new ones (Cosmic and Iced, all written in a relatively young programming language in terms of GUI, Rust). I’m the first one to blame PopOS for shipping Cosmic in such as rough state as version 1.0, but Linus is absolutely playing dumb to the point of contrivance here by ignoring the community and relying on ChatGPT to advice.

Any criticism ends up with hate and silent downvotes.

I think I’ve been pretty vocal and I’m not hating. I think my opinion is pretty nuanced.

I don’t blame him for trying PopOS because it has been recommended to him before. I do blame him for using LLMs and “listicles” for his research.

PopOS clearly is in a bad state right now and that is on them.

Sorry but, what you you on about?

Being free and open source is literally the entire premise and the most important “feature” of the Linux ecosystem: it will almost always be free (as in beer), and there will always be a lot of good choices. You’re probably never going to convince me that computers would be better off if we had to spend more money with fewer options.

People keep making this point, but to be perfectly honest it’s a dumb one because it’s the nature of the beast. OK, let’s say for the sake of argument that there’s too many distros out there, so now what?

None of this changes the fact that going to ChatGPT for advice (on pretty much any topic) is a bad idea. It doesn’t have thoughts or opinions, it doesn’t know that (for better or worse) Cosmic just shipped 1.0 a few months ago. It recommended him PopOS because it does nothing other than regurgitate old information scraped from the internet.

Its’ like… If I use an LLM for investment advice and I lose all of your money, who’s the idiot? I am.