I moved from the city I grew up in and gave away my car on the way out. That was in 2017, and I haven’t owned a car since. I drive extremely rarely — used to rent a car for a few hours every couple of months to run this or that errand in the Pacific Northwest US. I’ve since moved to a larger city with better transit on the US east coast. I live in the center city and can’t imagine any reason I would need to drive at this point. It’s been a few years since I’ve driven a car.

How practical it is will depend heavily on your lifestyle and where you live. If you’re in most parts of the US, the default assumption is that you will drive a car, and you will be excluded from many things if you don’t. If you already live in a place that is conducive, are willing to move to a place that is, or can otherwise structure your life in such a way that doesn’t require it, you can absolutely do it. There are certainly trade-offs, but you couldn’t pay me enough money to go back to a car-centric life.

I emailed support about this, and they replied telling me they had adjusted some configuration to try to fix the problem. Seems like it was an unintended result of some other change.

These are the dongles that came with the keyboards, so they’re paired out-of-the-box (although I have also used the process for re-pairing them). They are just connected to a USB port on the computer, so not really permanent, but I do leave them connected. Not both at the same time, but each in turn. Hope that answers your question, but I’m not 100% sure I understood it.

Since posting this, I’ve also tried installing powertop and checking the tunables. According to lsof -t, the dongle is connected directly to the root hub (under only xHCI host controller). I noticed in powertop that those controllers were still under power management, so I disabled them. That didn’t seem to help. The keyboard still lost connection.

Thanks for taking a look. Nothing in dmesg. I’m using the keyboard wired at the moment. That top entry happened when I disconnected USB. I flipped to 2.4GHz and tested the OS key which worked. Tested it periodically until it didn’t work but there were no additional log entries. The rest of the log entries happened when I reconnected USB.

[Mon May 26 11:07:31 2025] usb 1-12: USB disconnect, device number 8
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: new full-speed USB device number 10 using xhci_hcd
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: New USB device found, idVendor=fffe, idProduct=0082, bcdDevice= 1.07
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: Product: M67
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] usb 1-12: Manufacturer:  
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.0/0003:FFFE:0082.0017/input/input46
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] hid-generic 0003:FFFE:0082.0017: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Keyboard [  M67] on usb-0000:00:14.0-12/input0
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] hid-generic 0003:FFFE:0082.0018: hiddev96,hidraw1: USB HID v1.11 Device [  M67] on usb-0000:00:14.0-12/input1
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input47
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 System Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input48
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 Consumer Control as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input49
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] input:   M67 Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-12/1-12:1.2/0003:FFFE:0082.0019/input/input50
[Mon May 26 11:14:00 2025] hid-generic 0003:FFFE:0082.0019: input,hidraw2: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [  M67] on usb-0000:00:14.0-12/input2
[Mon May 26 11:14:02 2025] input: input-remapper   M67 Keyboard forwarded as /devices/virtual/input/input51

Are there other logs that would be good to check?

You’re right, but part of the draw of Linux is that you have more control over your OS. An immutable distro makes that a lot harder to get at as compared to non-immutable.

Yep! Like I said, freedom is more than one thing. The way this questions is framed tries to put the blinders on and obscure that fact, creating a false equivalency between the freedom to sideload software and some abstract notion of “absolute freedom” which doesn’t actually exist. We’re rarely choosing between absolute freedom and zero freedom, certainly not in this case.

Freedom is not one thing. The choice between iOS and Android is not a choice between zero freedom and unlimited freedom. You’re simply choosing which freedoms you want to prioritize.

I’m planning to switch to an Android device running an alternative OS with my next purchase after using iPhone exclusively since the 3g. That’s driven by a change in priorities: I want the freedom that comes from using a phone that isn’t a surveillance and advertising vehicle. For years now though, I’ve been enjoying the freedom of knowing my phone will continue to receive updates for a minimum of 5 years after I buy it new while some of my Android friends will be lucky if they get two.

I feel it’s important to note for new people that, while an immutable OS is great at keeping you from breaking your system, the way it achieves this can make some things you would want to do more difficult. In Bazzite, installing software, for example, works differently than under a typical distribution.

I’ll give the example of two pieces of software that I use regularly: 1Password and Espanso. It took a fair bit of digging to figure out how to install 1Password in a way that would preserve its tight system integration… and it still doesn’t quite work — copying a password in particular contexts just doesn’t put that password on the clipboard, while it works fine in other contexts. Espanso on the other hand just won’t work under Bazzite best I can tell. I haven’t found a way to install it at all so I’m just doing without. Oh My ZSH was also quite tricky, and I got yelled at in the Bazzite Discord for doing it the wrong way. 😅

Plenty of the software I use works fine and was easy to install: FreeTube, Kdenlive, VLC, Zen Browser… unless you count the fact that the 1Password browser integration just won’t work with Zen Browser, presumably because I haven’t found the exact right combination of Flatpak permissions plus settings that will allow it to.

All this to say, I love Bazzite for gaming and use it every day, but the moment you step outside that world and want your computer to do something a little bit differently, it’s a major headache. In the context of gaming, it’s much closer to “just works” than any other distro I’ve tried.

My brother used to work for an SEO company. They charged clients to have their web sites on directories which would improve their Google pagerank… until Google updated the algorithm to penalize sites listed in these directories. The company quickly pivoted to charging the same clients to have them removed from the directories they had just charged them to be listed in.

Oh, that’s helpful. Thank you for sharing that!

Turns out this was my goof. I was trying to set up auto-login on my user account. In doing so, I set it to automatically log in to Plasma (X11) instead of Plasma (Wayland). Odd that the default option in that dropdown is not the one you’re currently using, but 🤷‍♂️.

What I’m now trying to figure out is why I can’t set auto-login for Plasma (Wayland). The Apply button is disabled. 🤔

Thanks to everyone who shared ideas.

HDMI switcher is an interesting idea. Will it do more than just forward on the EDID? (Hope I have that right. 😅) Will it sorta translate it and push out its own EDID?

The cable is one of the two cables that previously completed the chain between the display and computer. Could it still be a problem in spite of that?

The monitor definitely is. Like I said, it was working when connected through the soundbar. It seems to be that it isn’t reporting capabilities the same way the soundbar did when connected directly to the computer.