I’ve got an R3 at home which generally works well. Flashing mainline OpenWRT was pretty smooth and easy. It’s been a while since I did the bring up, but I do remember having to jump through some hoops to get a partition layout that would utilize the onboard storage properly. By default it only left 10mb to install additional packages which seemed to defeat the purpose of having all of that emmc available. That may have changed in the more recent releases.

One bug I encounter regularly is that some (maybe older?) Apple devices seem to be able to lock up the router. Adding watchcat can get the thing rebooted in less than a minute in the event that it does hang, which makes it barely noticeable, but it’s not an ideal fix.

Depending on the devices you have in your house that might be a showstopper or of no consequence at all. Otherwise WiFi speeds and signal are great, as are general performance and reliability except for that bug I mentioned. Haven’t used VLANs but it’s all there and the flexibility of OpenWRT is great.

If I understand it correctly, Bluefin was just the first downstream uBlue variant like Aurora that had the various goodies built into the images. Bluefin effectively being the Gnome version of Aurora. I think it was simpler to tie the Aurora builds into the existing Bluefin pipeline for generating images and packages.

I highly recommend Aurora (dx) if it sounds like it fits the bill for what you’re looking for. After starting out with Kinoite and rebasing on Aurora-dx, the latter just feels like Kinoite with all of the desired additional packages already baked in, and some great additional shell scripts for convenience.

Rebasing sounded intimidating but it was literally just a simple shell command and a reboot. One additional command if you want to hang onto the previous image the way you had it. Rpm-ostree is pretty magical.

Heard this discussed on Knowledge Fight but haven’t seen the twitter space call myself. It’s not something I particularly want to seek out. But with Knowledge Fight being a credible source, I don’t doubt it.

Assuming they did in fact appear on the same space together while talking to and sometimes over each other: either the Muskrat previously put on an elaborate performance to give his sock puppet credibility, or his biggest stan sounds almost just like him.

I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that one of his worshipers would go so far as to adopt his speech patterns and try to sound like him. Or it could be a sock puppet run by his brother or cousin.

Every possibility is extremely pathetic, and I’m curious to see what shakes out.

I was just reading an article about Homeworld 3 and it sounds like I was mistaken about the online/skirmish thing. It sounds like it’s some sort of PvE coop mode or something. Still not my cup of tea. Still excited for the single player campaign.

I’m with you on the patient gaming. With few exceptions, purchasing the new hotness on day 1 means paying more for a worse experience. By the time a game goes on sale, the major bugs and balance issues will have all been fixed (if they’ll get fixed at all), so what’s the rush? Most gamers these days, myself included, have big enough backlogs that we’ll never be in the position of not having something fun available to play anyway.

I tried out Lightyear Frontier and Homeworld 3.

Lightyear Frontier made for a generally pleasant low-stakes low-stress first person farming game. The mech aspect had some minor jank in places, but nothing I think the developer can’t smooth out with some minimal adjustments. Seems like a good game to relax with.

Homeworld 3 looks beautiful. I played through the tutorial and it’s got me hyped for the full game. Only complaint was that there isn’t a proper single player level to the demo. It appears to just be a tutorial and skirmish/online, and I’m not a competitive multiplayer guy.

Three and a half years ago

Wow, I’m jealous you live somewhere that you can downgrade to 2.5Gb/s!

If you go that Banana Pi route, just be aware that the process of getting mainline OpenWrt on the thing is a little unusual, but not difficult at all. Just requires a cheap serial adapter and spare micro sd card.

There device has onboard NAND, NOR, and EMMC, as well as the card reader. Not all can be used simultaneously, so there are dip switches that set what is booted/visible.

Official install method is basically as follows:

-Hook up serial adapter to the send/receive/ground pins on the board, open serial terminal in something like PuTTY

-Set dip switches, boot the sd-card

-In serial terminal select option to install to NAND

-Power off, change dip switches, boot to NAND

-In serial terminal select option to install to eMMC

-Power off, change dip switches

-You’re done, now booting mainline on eMMC

Basically just putting the image on the NAND memory temporarily so it can be put back on eMMC since eMMC and sd-card can’t be used at the same time.

The Banana Pi forums are a good resource in addition to the OpenWRT docs.

My only gripe at this point is that the mainline configuration by default only sets up a 100mb partition on the eMMC to install packages to. Some folks have had success resizing that partition but I wasn’t having any luck there, so I may just compile it myself and set it larger. That change should be persistent through system upgrades after it’s done once.

Anyway, if you or someone reading this goes that route, I hope this helps!

Check out the Banana Pi BPI-R3. It’s getting mainline OpenWRT support with the 2023 release (RC builds available now). Amazing performance to price ratio. The only thing on your list that might be an issue is the 5Gb SFP. It has two SFP cages but I believe they max out at 2.5Gb. Also recommended to get the bundle with case and antennas included. Amazing price for what you get.