Onihikage

In general, Bazzite being immutable just means the core system isn’t modular to the end user to the degree that Arch is. You of course can use flatpaks or appimages like any distro, and there are still several ways to install traditional rpm/deb/aur programs (the usual Fedora method doesn’t work because dnf doesn’t exist). If it’s just an app that doesn’t require significant integration with the OS, the recommendation is to install them into a distrobox container (where dnf does exist) and then distrobox-export [program] to make them visible to the host system. VPNs need a little more integration so those are installed by layering with rpm-ostree and then enabling the systemd service(s). Layering makes updates take longer to install so it should be avoided when possible.

One of the interesting things about Universal Blue’s images like Bazzite is if you want the benefits of atomic while also having a more custom system than they offer without having to install a bunch of things in rpm-ostree, the process to build a custom image based on one of theirs is apparently quite easy to do and automate, though I haven’t done it myself.

In general, yes. Most of the difficulty is due to being on Linux and running games through the Proton/WINE compatibility layer, so there can be an extra layer of jank involved, but it’s very possible.

If modding consists of dropping files into the game directory, it will work almost exactly the same as in Windows. However, if some of those files replace the game’s DLLs, then whatever WINE runner you use might need to be told to use the DLLs in the game directory instead of its own.

If you need to use a mod manager, that situation is still not ideal - native Linux mod managers I know of are only the Nexus Mods app (very new, there’s some talk of it being integrated directly into the Heroic launcher) and Limo. Everything else, you’ll be running whatever bespoke Windows mod manager your game uses through Proton/WINE, probably with Steam Tinker Launch, possibly Lutris.

tl;dr There can be an extra layer of complexity over modding on Windows, but it’s otherwise comparable.

During boot, you’re presented with 4 snapshots you can choose between so if an update did happen to break something, it’s easy as just choosing an older snapshot after a reboot.

Those are actually just two snapshots, there’s a bug in GRUB that displays them twice. Purely visual, and you can fix it with a ujust script, run in the terminal with ujust configure-grub. There are lots of little scripted tweaks and installations available; you can get most of the list by running ujust by itself. Incredible work by the maintainers.

PCGameBenchmark seems to be exactly what you’re looking for.

You could try FreeFileSync. I use it for pretty much your exact use case, though my music library is much smaller and changes less often, so I haven’t tinkered with its automation. Manual sync works like a dream.

You’re entirely correct, but in theory they can give it a pretty good go, it just requires a lot more computation, developer time, and non-LLM data structures than these companies are willing to spend money on. For any single query, they’d have to get dozens if not hundreds of separate responses from additional LLM instances spun up on the side, many of which would be customized for specific subjects, as well as specialty engines such as Wolfram Alpha for anything directly requiring math.

LLMs in such a system would be used only as modules in a handcrafted algorithm, modules which do exactly what they’re good at in a way that is useful. To give an example, if you pass a specific context to an LLM with the right format of instructions, and then ask it a yes-or-no question, even very small and lightweight models often give the same answer a human would. Like this, human-readable text can be converted into binary switches for an algorithmic state machine with thousands of branches of pre-written logic.

Not only would this probably use an even more insane amount of electricity than the current approach of “build a huge LLM and let it handle everything directly”, it would take much longer to generate responses to novel queries.

Up in the Hardware Information section of hyfetch, on the left.

Webtoon is still shitty in other ways. When they adapt a property, they want it their way, regardless of the author’s original vision. I’ve seen several stories that originated on Royal Road get Webtoon adaptations, and the adaptations always seem to change or leave out important parts of the story, making characters look stupid or just completely replacing entire sets of characters, forcing the story to diverge substantially when inevitably something they got rid of turns out to have been critically important to where the author was taking things. They turn great stories into middling slop every single time.

Not them, but I do! https://youtu.be/s1fxZ-VWs2U

Granted.

An infinite quantity of ice cold water now exists within the exact dimensions of your water bottle.

Water has mass.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/orinoco-tribune-bias-and-credibility/

Overall, we rate Orinoco Tribune as extreme left biased and questionable due to its consistent promotion of anti-imperialist, socialist, and Chavista viewpoints. We rate them low factually due to their strong ideological stance, selective sourcing, the promotion of propaganda, and conspiracy theories related to the West.

The Orinoco Tribune has a clear left-leaning bias. It consistently supports anti-imperialist and Chavista perspectives (those who supported Hugo Chavez). The publication critiques U.S. policies and mainstream media narratives about countries opposing U.S. influence. Articles frequently defend the Venezuelan government and criticize opposition movements and foreign intervention.

Articles and headlines often contain emotionally charged language opposed to the so-called far-right of Venezuela, like this Far Right Plots to Sabotage Venezuela’s Electrical System in Attempt to Disrupt the Electoral Process. The story is translated from another source and lacks hyperlinked sourcing to support its claims.

Maybe don’t consider a pro-Maduro propaganda rag as a legitimate source for a conflict he’s directly involved in.

Maduro is a man who ordered his country to block Signal, ordered it to block social media, and arrests, imprisons, and bans his political opposition. He has also expressed strong support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile the citizens of his country have been starving for years under what is literally known as The Maduro Diet, and the middle class has vanished. He has long forfeit his right to the benefit of the doubt. He is a despot who has now repeatedly falsified election results after mismanaging the country for years, and calls his opposition fascists while being fascist. That the people overwhelmingly want him gone is not some hegemonic plot by the evil West, it’s the natural consequence of his actions.

OP is absolutely mistaken that it’s somehow ableist to stick to a meeting deadline or similar “punishment” for lateness, and t3rmit3 has said why much more eloquently than I could. However, you’ve said something that I can’t let pass without a rebuttal.

perpetual lateness means someone values their time more than they do the commitment and the time of others. period.
[…]
perpetual lateness, though, is a statement, that individual could not give a shit what others needs and responsibilities are

This is making a moral judgment on what you believe is in someone’s mind, and your judgment is based on a false premise. There exists an extremely common mental disorder (so common that some might consider it a form of neurodivergence) that when left untreated makes it much harder to do the things you want and are obligated to do. It’s harder to start doing things, it’s harder to stop, it’s harder to focus yet too easy to focus, it’s harder to remember important things, and it’s harder to motivate yourself to do anything you aren’t doing at any given moment, and anything you have to put effort into motivating yourself to do leaves you with less mental energy to do anything else in that category.

The one thing that can usually overcome all of these mental blocks is panic - when you’re actually out of time and Consequences are approaching if you don’t do something RIGHT NOW then you can finally do what you need to do and get something done - later than you wanted, worse than you wanted, more mentally drained, and with plenty of reasons to beat yourself up over it, not that it helps if you do. This is the reason behind why most people show up perpetually late. They might not let the emotional turmoil show, but if they’re consistently a few minutes late for everything, I can just about promise it’s not because they don’t care.

People who have this disorder and receive prescription medication for it often describe the first dose as like receiving superpowers. The idea that they can decide they want to do something, and then just go do it? Without thinking about it? No buildup? No psyching yourself into it? No roundabout coping strategies? No reorganizing the entire structure of your life to make it happen? No bargaining with the goddamn monkey in your brain that almost never lets you do the rational thing? Wait, normal people don’t have the monkey? They live like this every day, without any expensive pills? Impossible. It couldn’t be that simple. Do they have any idea how lucky they are?

Your misplaced sense of moral superiority is unfortunately quite common, but it’s not going to help these people, it’s going to hurt them. If it’s affecting their life, and it often is, they need treatment and training in how their brain works, not to be told they’re a piece of shit who doesn’t care about others and are choosing to inconvenience everyone else in their life including themselves. That’s only going to put them in a worse place.

Unfortunately I can’t even test Llama 3.1 in Alpaca because it refuses to download, showing some error message with the important bits cut off.

That said, the Alpaca download interface seems much more robust, allowing me to select a model and then select any version of it for download, not just apparently picking whatever version it thinks I should use. That’s an improvement for sure. On GPT4All I basically have to download the model manually if I want one that’s not the default, and when I do that there’s a decent chance it doesn’t run on GPU.

However, GPT4All allows me to plainly see how I can edit the system prompt and many other parameters the model is run with, and even configure multiple sets of parameters for the same model. That allows me to effectively pre-configure a model in much more creative ways, such as programming it to be a specific character with a specific background and mindset. I can get the Mistral model from earlier to act like anything from a very curt and emotionally neutral virtual intelligence named Jarvis to a grumpy fantasy monster whose behavior is transcribed by a narrator. GPT4All can even present an API endpoint to localhost for other programs to use.

Alpaca seems to have some degree of model customization, but I can’t tell how well it compares, probably because I’m not familiar with using ollama and I don’t feel like tinkering with it since it doesn’t want to use my GPU. The one thing I can see that’s better in it is the use of multiple models at the same time; right now GPT4All will unload one model before it loads another.

I have a fairly substantial 16gb AMD GPU, and when I load in Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k (Q4_0), it gives me about 12 tokens per second. That’s reasonably fast enough for me, but only 50% faster than CPU (which I test by loading mlabonne’s abliterated Q4_K_M version, which runs on CPU in GPT4All, though I have no idea if that’s actually meant to be comparable in performance).

Then I load in Nous Hermes 2 Mistral 7B DPO (also Q4_0) and it blazes through at 50+ tokens per second. So I don’t really know what’s going on there. Seems like performance varies a lot from model to model, but I don’t know enough to speculate why. I can’t even try Gemma2 models, GPT4All just crashes with them. I should probably test Alpaca to see if these perform any different there…

I actually found GPT4ALL through looking into Kompute (Vulkan Compute), and it led me to question why anyone would bother with ROCm or OpenCL at all.

Rather than replace, I’d guess it could be an alternative. The best part of it will be the ability to natively disable the top tab bar instead of needing a janky userchrome css hack that doesn’t even fully work.

PCIe gen 5 is for the PCIe slots and NVMe storage slots, but they’re backwards compatible; you can put a gen 3 component in a gen 5 slot and it will work at gen 3 speeds. Similarly, if you put a gen 5 component in a gen 4 slot, it will be limited to gen 4 speeds. Right now there’s very little appreciable difference between gen 4 and gen 5 unless you’re spending a lot of money on the component (GPU/storage). Another thing to note is that Gen 5 requires that both the CPU and motherboard support it; a CPU with gen 4 support in a gen 5 motherboard will limit all the slots to gen 4 speeds.

RAM is a totally different standard that must be matched exactly for what the motherboard has; if it’s a DDR5 motherboard then you have to use DDR5 RAM or it won’t even fit in the slots. You can get a PCIe gen 5 motherboard and just use gen 4 SSDs or GPUs, that’s perfectly fine and leaves you room to upgrade later.

Seems mostly fine to me, I game all the time on Linux (Bazzite gang 🤘) with a 3900X + 7900GRE, haven’t had any significant issues aside from needing to make sure clock speeds were configured correctly on the GPU. Two ram sticks is the way to go with these systems as sometimes they don’t support 4 sticks at full speed.

You’re right that GPU passthrough is definitely more for tinkering or advanced users with very specific needs (usually professionals who need Windows/Nvidia and choose to run it in a VM rather than dual-boot), with a budget to match. For a gamer couple, having fully separate systems is going to be much less hassle and more resilient against failure.

The one thing I would recommend changing is the power supply, it’s unironically the most important component in the computer because if it fails it can kill everything else, and the System Power 10 is known enough for being low-quality that discussions of that come up in web searches. Poor quality power supplies can damage your hardware and otherwise cause weird, intermittent issues even if everything seems to work fine most of the time, and will fail and shut off the computer when a good power supply would have just kept on chugging. Seasonic and Corsair are considered the best brands and have 10 year warranties - they’re more expensive, but they’re worth it. You want 80+ Gold or better these days, this is a buy once, cry once component.

If you don’t have a UPS, I would also recommend getting one at some point, either one big shared unit (if they’ll be close together) or two individual units. Having backup power will allow you to shut down the computers gracefully during a power outage, and prevents the worst-case scenario where the power goes out while the computer is installing updates and it turns into a brick.

At least their username is accurate!

Well, not free per se, DVDs and Blurays and the computer in my closet I use to host Jellyfin for the rest of the home do cost money… But they sure as hell can’t jack up the price after the fact. Quite the contrary; the hardware needed for it is getting cheaper over time. I can also use it even when the internet is down.