Any software KVM like Synergy.

I work from home and Synergy has been a core part of my setup for many years.

It lets me use my personal PC and work laptop from one KB+M seamlessly.

I’ve tried so many different things. Input Leap, installed on Aurora by default, is supposed to work with Wayland, but doesn’t work out of the box.

I’m resigned to using Windows during the week so I can use Synergy and switching back to Linux over the weekend because I prefer it now.

I think KDE is doing the heavy lifting of being like Windows. As a long time Windows user who would every now and then try Ubuntu and hate it, it was Gnome that really turned me off. KDE is so much nicer, IMO.

I started on Bazzite as my first real Linux desktop. After a while I rebased to Aurora (Bluefin but KDE instead of Gnome) and I really liked it. I ended up rebasing back to Bazzite for a while.

My only issue is around a very specific piece of software that has issues with Wayland. That’s why all the rebasing.

Being able to rebase so easily like that is so freaking cool.

As a Java developer, and someone who never learned Python or other scripting languages, Node is my go-to scripting language. I’ve only come around to it for that in the past year or two. But it’s great.

Mustard is great on its own, but better mixed with ketchup, IMO.

And then when to do learn it, it pisses you off when something doesn’t have a freely available image.

I just sold my 3070 and bought a 7800XT for the same reasons.

I’m going to up vote and ruin this, but document for posterity.

I have a very similar story, only I went with Bazzite, and now Aurora.

I was using 11 and honestly didn’t hate it, but I could see the writing on the wall. The Steam Deck showed me what I could do with Linux, do I just did it.

I had dabbled with Ubuntu desktop in the past, but it was the Steam Deck with KDE that really sold me on Linux for the desktop.

I do not like GNOME. KDE is great, though.

My dad got and refurbished a vintage receiver and was showing it off to me. I asked if he was listening to a CD or a record because I’d never heard clearer audio. Nope, it was an FM station.

Blew my mind.

A lot of the modern tech is really good, though.

Cars are way more reliable than they were. They get way better gas mileage. They have a shitload more power (this is actually a con due to how everyone else drives these days). They’re way safer in both accidents and just general driving with traction control and lane departure warnings.

So it’s a real mixed bag. But I’d rather have the cars of today.

Auto detection for MQTT devices is a bit tricky. I struggled with that myself when I was trying to incorporate data from a web scraper I wrote. This config file here shows what I ended up with to create auto detecting sensors in HA https://github.com/chunkystyles/reservationsScraper/blob/main/mqttConfig.json

Each one of the devices gets registered at start up of the app.

If I were doing this all over again, I probably wouldn’t use auto detect sensors. I’d manually configure them. Here’s some examples of that kind of configuration I used for some HVAC remote devices I built:

mqtt:
  sensor:
    - name: "makerfabs_remote_1"
      state_topic: "makerfabs/hvacremote/1/status_out"
      force_update: true
      expire_after: 125
    - name: "makerfabs_remote_2"
      state_topic: "makerfabs/hvacremote/2/status_out"
      force_update: true
      expire_after: 125
    - name: "makerfabs_remote_3"
      state_topic: "makerfabs/hvacremote/3/status_out"
      force_update: true
      expire_after: 125
    - name: "makerfabs_remote_4"
      state_topic: "makerfabs/hvacremote/4/status_out"
      force_update: true
      expire_after: 125

For these to work, you just put them in your “configuration.yaml” file in HA.

With atomic, unstable updates aren’t a problem. You can just run back to previous.

Atomic distros are so cool like that.

I’m contractually obligated to harass you about that key rotation slip up.

That’s what we call “brand synergy”.

Look at Bluefin or Aurora. They are also made by Universal Blue and have developer versions that come with Tailscale VPN. They’re built on Fedora Silverblue just like Bazzite. I personally just moved to Bazzite two weeks ago, and then switched to Aurora.

No, because it’s a software KVM and it needs to be able to read, mirror, and suppress mouse and keyboard actions.

Setting up is stupid easy. What makes immutable distros potentially difficult is installing software. Anything packaged as a flatpak is stupid easy. Beyond that it can get complicated. But it’s not bad in general.

Having just switched to Linux with Bazzite two weeks ago, my biggest issues have come from Wayland support. And that’s really just because I have a specific piece of software I need that doesn’t support Wayland. And that’s a bit of an edge case and the result is more annoyance than show stopper.

I’m literally switching from Bazzite to Aurora right now.

Bluefin and Aurora are the same except they use Gnome and KDE respectively.

Each offers a general purpose version and a developer experience version.