Nimrod

I travel a lot on weekends, so I often don’t get to watch my teams Sunday game. There used to be a site where you could go and watch the recordings of the past weeks games, but I can’t seem to find anything like that lately.

Anyone know of a way without paying $500 for NFL Sunday ticket?

I have a Shelly dimmer 2 behind one of the switches in my kitchen running Tasmota. There are two switch inputs on the Dimmer module, so I have it behind a 2 gang wall box with two physical switches. Each switch is connected to one of the switch inputs of the Shelly.

I've set the switches to be independent of each other, so I can potentially use the different switches for different triggers. Switch one is configured as a push button switch and dims my kitchen lights. Switch two does nothing. I desire to have switch2 trigger my dining room lights, so after some digging I discovered that I can use MQTT to make Home Assistant do stuff! Perfect.

But not perfect. I set up an automation to listen for this devices' MQTT topic "tele/lights_kitchen/SENSOR" and when the switch is flipped either up or down, my mosquitto broker hears that topic, and it just toggles my lights! I thought I had it all figured out. But what I didn't notice at first, is that the Shelly Dimmer pings out an MQTT status every so often, even if no switches are flipped. So my dining room lights have been going on and off all afternoon!

There is some data in the payload of the MQTT that I think should be able to fix my issue, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing how.

The payload contains a key:value pair {"Switch2":"ON"} or "OFF". So I'm hoping I can use a change in that value as a toggle. Because it's operating as a 3 way switch, I don't care if the actual value is ON or OFF, I just want to know if it's changed. Do I need some sort of helper that keeps track? This seems like something MQTT would be good at, but I can't find a good example to steal the right config from. I thought maybe I could use two triggers, one for each state, but that makes a huge complicated set of logic that needs to be added, and I really feel like there should be a more elegant way to handle this.

Any assistance?

So, I have my desktop configured with two drives, one has a regular windows install on it that I need to play games with my brother. That works fine.
My second drive originally had Debian on it. But I wanted to also install EndeavorOS. At this point in time, all 3 work, but the selection process to access each system is painfully different.

To access Windows, I just boot from cold, and hit enter or wait for the timer to run out on Windows booting. But when I hit esc to cancel booting Windows, it brings me to Debian's GRUB selector. But I think when I installed EOS I used the default settings, and I believe it doesn't use GRUB by default (systemd). So the GRUB menu I get only has Debian or Windows. If I hit 'esc' again I am brought to the grub> command line. Here the only thing I know how to do is type "exit" and it closes this grub> cmd line and opens another, very similar one. I type 'exit' again and I am finally met with EndeavorOS's boot selector (I believe this is systemd?)

Now I know from my first dual boot with windows/Debian that I am pretty much stuck having windows boot loader run first, so my perfect scenario of having a single selector off boot is a pipe dream, but I'd love to remove a few of the GRUB cmd steps in getting to EOS (chances are I will only need the Debian system for very specific tasks. odds are I will end up removing it) I'm guessing if I would have told the EOS installer to use GRUB it would have potentially added EOS to the GRUB selection screen? Is it possible to rectify this without wiping and reinstalling with different boot loader options?

Background: I'm not "new" to linux, but this is my first year daily driving it. I have been running Mint on my main PC for a little over a year, and I love it.

My super old chromebook (Acer c720) has reached end of life. It is no longer supported by Google, and will not receive updates. I've toyed with dual-booting it to Linux in the past with Bodhi, but eventually it broke, and I ended up reverting to ChromeOS. That was years ago, and my patience/knowledge has grown, and I'm committed to switching.

So the other day I went ahead and pulled the trigger. I removed the write-protect screw from the Chromebook's motherboard, and installed Debian 12. I really just chose Debian because I already had a flash drive with the ISO on it for a different project (rooting my Dreame vacuum). It also runs GNOME by default, and I had never used that, so I thought it would be worth a try.
Turns out, I didn't mind GNOME, and I really loved the three-finger swipe to switch workspaces. BUT... The function keys on the chromebook that are used for changing the screen's brightness don't work. So I dove down the rabbit hole of trying to get those to work. Found 'xbacklight' and gave it a go. didn't work, and I struggled with it for a few hours until I discovered that xbacklight doesn't work with Wayland... So I attempted to disable wayland, and also made some other changes that lead to my Chromebook not completing its boot up... whoops. Every challenge is an opportunity, so I figured - why not explore some other distros, and see if I can't find one that fits my needs a bit better?

Now the request: The hardware of this machine is OLD, so I am hoping to put something super light on it, but still be able to have a few features:

1. Trackpad gestures (swapping workspaces, navigating firefox).
2. Window snapping (left and right panes at least)
3. I don't care too much about how it looks, but I need to be able to map the function keys to volume and brightness.

I have been lurking on Lemmy for long enough to have watched all the memes/conversations about different desktop managers (GNOME/Xfce/etc) but I never really understood what the deal was, but now I am coming face to face with that decision, and I'd love some "professional" input!

Edit: the only "real" activities I will use this for is web browsing, terminal stuffs for my servers/other machines/homeassistant, and some note taking. So default programs can be SUPER minimum.

I want to get my partner a replacement for an aging chromebook. I was thinking it would be easiest to just grab another super budget chromebook and call it a day. But the more I read about google and chrome, the less I want to do with them.

So my goal is to snag a cheap ($300ish?) laptop that I can slap Linux on (probably mint, but I’m open to suggestions).

The main caveat is the size- needs to be small. Current chromebook is 11.5” I think. I’d like to keep it under 13”. The main use (95% will be web browsing/streaming/email/bullshit) but I’d like it to have enough juice to play Minecraft on my local server.

I’ve looked around a bit, but my god there is a lot of options. I’d love it if there was just a recommendation that was proven to work. I’m busy enough tinkering with all the other tech, and I’d like to just set this one up and forget it.