Cantos

I am well aware, but the abandonment is not the issue. Your 600 eurodollars does not guarantee the perpetual existence of Eshtek. There are many ways HexOS could go south and no big tech with big money need be involved at all. The key thing is how HexOS is abandoned. And even Google is capable of gracefully shutting down services like Stadia, where everyone got a refund and the controller got Bluetooth mode instead of turning into e-waste. HexOS is not guaranteed to become useless just because it has online activation right now. Probably? Isn't it definitely? The data is in a ZFS pool that you should be able to import into TrueNAS, no?

I assume the online activation is there because HexOS is a commercial product. Shutting down activation would really only make sense with the shut down of Eshtek as a company (or the end of development and sale of HexOS). I think it is very likely that if that ever happens they will remove the activation requirement before shutting down deck.hexos.com. And even if they decided, for some bizarre reason, to brick HexOS, the underlying TrueNAS SCALE would still work just like it does now, so nobody would be truly cooked anyway.

Not possible. License transfers are not permitted. All licenses are tied to the purchasing account.

@ThoDC If you haven't already, email support@hexos.com and they will schedule a time to work with you on this. See

I wanted to ask, what tool you are using, because the blog doesn't specifically mention it, but then I noticed it's Playwright. Probably the best choice. I hope these tests continue to grow and keep making your lives easier.

@jonp I work in software development so all of this is painfully familiar. When I saw the Immich struggles, I immediately thought "I bet they had a solution ready and it was obliterated by one of those updates". That reminds me of the classic: "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." Any half-decent team of developers is capable of making work almost any feature and solving almost any issue. If you are thinking "couldn't they just do X?", the answer is that they probably could. However, that would always be at the cost of something else being worse, broken or delayed... or it would take too much time, require too many people or cost too much money (usually at least two out of three).

They likely don't know yet, because they are still working on it. Imagine they communicate that you need to start again from scratch and then they figure out automatic migration. Or even worse, they say that automatic migration is in the works and then they run into a huge issue that makes it unworkable. How would that be received?

In the dashboard it's under Dash > Network > Details: It also shows up on the server itself after it boots up:

I think this is only you. My Deck works normally. Try opening the URL in incognito mode or clearing browser cache.

Seems like I already explained this kindly enough. Here's my last shot. To most, no terrible product is made good by having quality and clear documentation, change logs, tutorials, release cycles, roadmaps, etc. Most casual users never even look at any of that stuff. They expect things will be obvious and just work. If they don't, they give up. What is obvious to all users, not just the most basic ones: it is painfully annoying to use any terrible product, where the developers are not given time and space to do their best work. Especially in beta, when there are big and frequent changes that periodically make whole swaths of docs, tutorials, release cycles, roadmaps, etc. obsolete and useless, working on stuff like that is an annoying waste of effort. The quality of an OS is not purely in its code, but it is mostly in its code. While one can have both quality communication and a quality product, if I had to allocate development resources of a project in beta, I would allocate them to product, not communication. Especially because bad communication can be much worse than no communication. The impetus for my comments was the fact the other people brought up marketing, and I also get why they stopped replying.

Yeah, not sure why that other guy brought up marketing... I agree, I have no idea why that other guy brought up marketing. That's great. At release. How much do you value the quality of the product, though? Would you sacrifice product quality for any/all of those things? Before you even release?

That really is no explanation of what you meant. Anyway, it is precisely the point. Many, including me, wouldn't be here without the influencer getting their view and endorsing HexOS ("world-class marketing"). It is true the existing early access beta testers (or "users" as you are calling them) will not benefit much from more marketing. They will, however, benefit if the product continually improves and becomes "amazing", right? Good thing that Eshtek poured the unexpected influx of capital into a "frantic growth" of development capacities and not PR, marketing and community managers, right? By the way, I did not originally bring up marketing, but yes, marketing is for people who are not using the product, so definitely not us. I only made it clear, that Eshtek has marketing covered. Very true, and the lion's share of this reputation, especially at release and beyond, will be based on the quality of the product.

What did you mean by that? What's "curious" about any of those words given their context?

The LTT video with 1,6 million views was huge, Linus himself invested in the company. HexOS went from a niche little thing to frantic growth because of the huge influx of customers. They are fine, when it comes to interest. They don't need to worry. Now it is important for them to focus on delivery more than on anything else, because to have a great product isn't just good, it's existential for them. If they fail that, no amount of "communication" and "advocacy" is going to help.

Those are very weird examples. HexOS isn't a movie or video game. It's about as different from those as it gets. And, even so, HexOS has a world class marketing campaign behind it already. In reality, marketing matters very little to a niche, but excellent (or terrible) product that is supposed to be used daily for years and years. Word of mouth among enthusiasts matters much more. And that will come naturally, if the product is amazing.