this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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I kinda want to hook one up to raspberry pi for some home control, but I'm not sure if the software to configure it works on Linux (or how it even presents itself HID-device wise)

I'm sure it'll eventually be reverse engineered and have some custom drivers on github soon, but a quick google came up empty for this new device.

Edit: Oh I just realized this hasn't been released yet, I saw the "buy now" button and assumed it was.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

::: spoiler With Linux over the years, I have learned to ignore all hardware marketing as (basically) scammers. The supporting software is the important part. If the software is not open source, the product is only available to rent and likely includes or has the potential to become an extortion scam of subscription parasites. When I shop for products now, I do so by searching for the open source software first. Once I find a large project with several contributors, I git clone the repo and then I run an app called gource on the command line. Gource creates a 3d visualization of the project over time and its commit history. Have a look at the Linux kernel some time or just watch a video of someone that has uploaded the visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iFnzr73XXk

With the actual visualization, you can zoom in and select the individuals or watch branches specifically. The trick is to get an idea of who the main contributors are in the various spaces and how consistent they are. Find who is working on what hardware and how they are working on it. Some times you'll see a person comes in and only makes a single commit or a few that contain everything for a device and then they disappear. These are often subcontracted devs that a company hires and gives a checklist. Issues, bugs, and unsupported features are unlikely to get fixed unless you see someone else that is making commits in this space. What you're really looking for is one of the main project devs that makes ongoing commits to some specific hardware over longer amounts of time and fairly recently. It means they have the device in question. That generally means the device has or will have excellent support in the long term. It also generally means the person either really liked the product or the company is smart enough to supply the dev with the device or supporting documentation.

Sorry if this seems unsolicited. It took me a long time to break out of the hardware spec shopping fallacy and all of the troubles it can cause. Prioritizing true ownership and shopping for the software first is a far more enjoyable life experience. It likely won't help in this niche, but for computers in general use: https://linux-hardware.org/

You will likely find that search engines attempt to obfuscate this information. Expect that. Use offline open source LLM's, ask the community, or more advance searching methods to find relevant info. Both m$ and the goo are the two biggest beneficiaries of the proprietary software ecosystem and they are the only two web crawlers that exist at relevant scale. All search engines use one or both of these sources either directly or by proxy.