A couple of years ago I lived in a house with a few friends that we rented from one of their parents. They had a somewhat extensive homeassistant setup. We set up a couple of fun automations.

-Enter 8675309 on a keypad by the door - Play the song at full volume

-Enter 911 - Play police sirens at gradually increasing volume

-Enter 420 - Play that one sample of Snoop Dogg saying “smoke weed every day.”

-Leave the fridge or freezer door open for more than five minutes, start playing Dare to be Stupid by Weird Al at full volume and set all of the lights to red.

I can’t speak to the Quest support as I don’t have one, but my Index definitely had issues when I first switched to Linux fulltime. I had been dual-booting for about a year prior to that. But over the last year, it’s gotten better and most titles I’ve tried lately seem to just work the same way they did on Windows.

I do still have this persistent issue where my computer treats the headset as the primary display during bootup if have it plugged in, but that’s OS independent and starts at POST.

I’ve also seen some changelogs a while back suggesting Valve was trying to get OpenVR and SteamVR more compatible and make them both work better on Linux. I don’t know what issues you were having or how recently but it might be worth digging into again if it’s something you care about.

I honestly haven’t really noticed any major build quality issues. Just that the two separators on either side of the trackpad module don’t quite sit level with the trackpad module itself and if I’m being really nitpicky there’s slightly more deck flex in the keyboard than I like.

Other than those two things, the laptop is solid, at least under my usage patterns. If you were swapping IO modules frequently then I could see wear on the plastic edge of the modules and laptop body and maybe the usb-c connector itself potentially becoming an issue after a couple of years.

Been using a FW16 with fedora. It is pretty solid.

I’ll second that. I’ve been using Fedora KDE for almost a year as my sole desktop OS with no notable issues and really only one minor gripe. Which is that my 240Hz monitor gains a distracting flicker at 240Hz, but if I set it to 120Hz it goes away.

My recommendation would be dual-boot until you get everything you need working and have had everything working for a month or two under Linux. Then do a full image backup of the Windows partitions with the Windows backup utility and keep it around just in case. After that spin-up a Windows VM for any edge cases you might come across and enjoy Linux.

They mention in the post that they have a list of official clients you can choose to donate to.

So, if there’s a client you use every day and that you love, consider finding it’s author in our list of official clients, and sending them a little something instead (or too).

It would probably be helpful if they included a link to that list in the post, though it is just one click from the projects homepage, and made it clearer that the list does include at least some subset of third-party clients. Though it would also be reasonable to infer that from the quote.

Something I only saw mentioned in a somewhat snarky comment in this thread (apologies if I missed it elsewhere) is that Windows has the option to do a full system image backup.

If you have an external hdd or a nas, from the Windows Backup applet in control panel (not settings) you can create a system image that will contain a full backup of your C: drive and, optionally other drives in your system. You can then restore that backup from the recovery options in your windows install media.

For the windows install media, I’d recommend using the windows media creation tool to create a usb installer on a separate usb key from your Linux installer and then setting it aside just in case. Trying to create windows install media from within Linux is, while not impossible, difficult.

Obviously, you should do all of this before committing to installing Linux to disk. Most Linux install media also functions as a live Linux environment from which you can try things out and see if things will work for you.

This is some good advice. I’d add two caveats though: - For learning the distro’s package manager, while I’d say it’s definitely good to learn it (and do so early on), I’d also say beginners should probably stay away from the command line version of it unless it’s absolutely needed. - For running commands from random websites rather than a blanket prohibition, I’d say don’t do it unless you can confidently say you understand what the command will do and are willing to take the risk that you’re wrong.

Bookworm, Trixie, and Sid all currently support a total of 10 different architectures.

And looking through the Wikipedia article for Debian’s version history, most of the dropped architectures were functionally obsolete when they were dropped, or like the Motorola 68000, when support was added. (notable exceptions being IA-64 which was dropped 4 years before intel discontinued it, SPARC which is still supported by Oracle, and PowerPC.)

Unless you’re using one of the more recent Win11 builds, where you won’t be able to finish OOBE without an internet connection unless you had the foresight to patch the installer beforehand.