Eh, I did 4 or 5 years on Arch, broke a lot, learned a lot, got tired of that and retired to Fedora, now Bazzite. I would recommend Arch or Cachy to someone with technical chops, which is a surprising amount of PC gamers, who wants to get up to speed fast on linux. I’ll recommend ArchWiki regardless. Then there are the others who just want to game with minimal friction, for them, Bazzite. Horses for courses… Hard agree on Ubuntu.
Duh, but it shines in immutable. Enjoy your debian, I like it too, for servers.
It’s AMD to start (7800XT), so if the screens off it uses like 6-8W anyway, then undervolt with LACT.
I think you as yet don’t quite understand the full beauty of immutable distros. Running things in distroboxes, yeah even other distros, is not a bug, it’s a feature (really) because you cannot break your main OS with a distrobox. As a developer it’s a godsend, finnicky AI project that needs a specific version of python and CUDA drivers and only has instructions for Arch ? That’s a distrobox, spin it up, play with it, archive it for later, put it away.
There’s tiers in Bazzite, for GUI apps, flatpak, if what you want isn’t there, it’s in a distrobox Arch in AUR and you can integrate it as an application into the main OS. Stuff that truly needs system level access, like zsh and intel-undervolt gets layered into the main OS with rpm-ostree. There’s security benefits as well like SELinux, but this post has gone on long enough.
It is so not an iPhone.
My second screen is a laptop (T580), also bazzite, often running moonlight to the big monitor so the main box goes to low power mode when not in use (it’s also the NAS, so no sleep, but mostly lives @ ~50W, got the GPU down to 4W idle :)
This. If you must have rooted containers docker-compose is only a
rpm-ostree install docker-compose
away, but that’s a big ass layer, you’ll feel it every update, and insecure to boot (yes I know docker finally got userspace, but how many times have you seen it used? Everywhere it’s root.). Run your docker-compose file through podlet, and there you go, userspace quadlets (95+% of the time, every time…). They’re easy to love once you get your head around them.
Agreed, when SteamOS gets more general hardware supporty things will get interesting, but Bazzite is a desktop with superlative Steam support, while SteamOS is more a steam console with desktop support. When people, especially newbs, want to do desktop things with their general purpose machines, on SteamOS they’re using Arch (bleeding edge, lower stability), while Bazzites get Fedora (sharp edge, higher stability and security) which should be a less painful and frustrating experience. Of course if there’s a flatpak (possibly the third step) it’ll be painless on either, and hey, everybody wins (except winblows) in either case.
Using wireguard to VPN into your home network is mostly trivial (using tailscale to do so is actually trivial, for my usage of the word, but introduces an untrusted company into the mix), opening your local network to the outernet is not, expect pain.
Soulseek has a surprising number of oddities…
Nah, NVLink is irrelevant for inference workloads (inference nearly all happens in the cards, models are split up over multiple and tokens are piped over pcie as necessary), mildly useful for training but you’ll get there without them.
yup, the syntax is (from within the distrobox)
distrobox-export --app appname
Run Arch in a distrobox, done (in atomic you lean hard on distrobox and flatpak).
Yup, OP has done his time in Arch meaning now competent, probably, time to go to Fedora and relax, close enough to the edge but not bleeding, good QA, For extra chill go atomic, check out uBlue…
I do it with a gluetun container (more versatile) zero issues, but you can just mainline wireguard as an interface if you prefer, also works fine, on bazzite.
Thinkpads have long had first tier linux support, in fact many models have shipped with linux for at least a decade (?), checking that is a really good way to be sure, but you’re going to be fine with W, P, T, X lines, many enthusiasts make light work. They were deployed (might still be) to Red Hat kernel devs for a long time, which helps things along. Fingerprint drivers tend to be proprietary and hit or miss, but passwords work.
Honestly learning to install linux yourself, and configure it to your liking, is actually, imo, a really important path to learning and you’re likely doing yourself a disservice avoiding it. It’s part of the avoidance of vendor lock in you want. Installation is surprisingly easy now, start with something simple, Mint is often recommended these days, find a decent, recent, youtube and you’ll probably be up and running in an hour. Find the apps you need for your workflow (which will take considerably longer). Get familiar with the terminal. Best thing you can do after that is burn it down and install a new distro, leaving any mistakes behind, keeping your list of apps. Arch if you want to get really deep into it, or Fedora / Bazzite are good choices and very stable. Best of luck.
Perhaps not saved, but I’d venture the most significant nail in the coffin of the scientific publishing mafia so far, pursued with integrity and honor. The rise of open publishing that followed is very telling, and in my mind directly attributable to Alexandra’s work and it’s popularity, they know they need to adapt or (probably and) die.
Still need to work on the publish or perish mentality, getting negative results published, and getting corporate propaganda out of the mix, to name a few.
You can cycle the smaller drives to cold backup, that’s not a waste. You do have backups, which RAID is not, right?
Sure, works fine for inference with tensor parallelism, USB4 / thunderbolt 4/5 is a better (40Gbit+ and already there) bet than ethernet (see distributed-llama). Trash for training / fine tuning, that needs higher inter GPU speed, or better a bigger GPU VRAM.
Seems like data integrity is your highest priority, and you’re doing pretty well, the next step is keeping a copy offsite. It’s the 3-2-1 backup strategy, 3 copies, 2 media (used to mean CDs etc but now think offline drives) 1 offsite (in case of fire, meteor strike etc), so look to that, stash a copy at a friends or something.
In your case I’d look at getting some online storage to fill the offsite role while you’re overseas (paid probably, but a year of 1 or 2 Tb is quite reasonable) leaving you with no pressure on the selfhosting side, just tailscale in, muck around and have fun, and if something breaks, no harm done, data safe.
I’ve done it for what seems like forever and I’d still be worried about leaving a system out of physical control for any extended period of time, at the very least having someone to reboot it if connectivity or power fails will be invaluable, but talking them through a broken update is another thing entirely, and you shouldn’t make that a critical necessity, too much stress.
This. RAID IS NOT A BACKUP !!! Sorry for shouting, but it’s that important. It’s a main storage tolerant of disk failure, you still need backups or you’re one bad ‘rm -rf’ away from losing data.
First get that second 8Tb, or better yet a 16+Tb (see serverpartdeals.com or your local equivalent for good prices on manufacturer recertified drives) so you have room to grow. Now copy that 8Tb onto it and disconnect it from your computer. Congratulations, you have a cold backup and are pretty well protected from data loss, much better than a RAID.
You can now think about a NAS with confidence, but preferably before that get another drive copy your data again and take it to a friend / relative / safety deposit box (even bury it in the back yard in something waterproof). Now you have a 3-2-1 backup strategy and you’re pretty damn well insulated against data loss.
TLDR: Backup first, NAS later.