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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t know it was so easy to pirate switch games. I paid for a ubisoft title that won’t load due to copy protection or some other such bullshit that I don’t care to debug.

I guess if I care at all about actually playing it (I got it for my kindergartner, who promptly asked me to return it to get my money back once it failed to run), the hard part will be bluetooth paring the switch controllers to my Linux box.

Thanks for the roundabout tech support, Nintendo!

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> I didn’t know it was so easy to pirate switch games.

I didn't either.

I have a launch-day Switch. I waited in line that night for Zelda.

Now, within the past week, for some reason or another I was feeling oddly impatient. I decided to see if I had any aluminum foil laying around to play with. I did, and my impatience suddenly waned away within a download or two. It was that easy.

I am still looking forward to picking up my Collector's Edition for Tears of the Kingdom that I pre-ordered the minute I could. However, I'm much more patient now.

Any tips for where to start regarding Switch homebrew? I have a switch lite that goes mostly unused, but would love to put linux (or you know, have access to a terminal) on it in some form. I mostly exist inside a hackernews bubble -- and a personal recommendation would be more satisfying than me throwing keywords at google and hoping for the best.

I think for the Switch lite you will need to do some soldering

https://www.reddit.com/r/SwitchPirates/comments/139y23v/succ...

Thankyou - that links to a great resource and looks like a fun project.

https://nh-server.github.io/switch-guide/

> the hard part will be bluetooth paring the switch controllers to my Linux box.

Do you expect that to be hard? The mainline kernel has a driver already.

https://github.com/DanielOgorchock/linux/blob/ogorchock/driv...

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

I've never found bluetooth controllers to work that well on linux. The pairing process seems to always be flaky, and then latency issues are often an issue as well.. Certainly not seamless like using them on the switch is.

I think it depends on your computer's bluetooth hardware.

Mine reports itself as a Cambridge Silicon Radio USB device 0A12:0001, and works great with recent Sony controllers, while people with some other dongles have reported lag and/or unstable connections.

This list is a bit old, and wasn't aimed at Nintendo controllers, but might still be a good place to start:

https://github.com/chrippa/ds4drv/wiki/Bluetooth-dongle-comp...

My experience is the exact opposite, although this probably depends on the quality of the Bluetooth driver in use. My Stadia controller works great on Linux, autoconnecting on power-on and everything.

I expect paring them to be harder than torrenting a copy of the game I bought and installing an emulator to run it, but easier than debugging whatever garbage ubisoft included that prevents my licensed copy from working on my unmodified switch.

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