You’re not wrong, but when/if (joyously, apparently, often it’s more profitable to destroy things for the tax break than to sell them) a significant surplus appears, adapters or new motherboards will appear fairly soon. Even things like H200s can probably be made into co-processors (hopefully running at a sane wattage for home users), as u/tal says there’s already ways to integrate into the linux kernel as (very fast) RAM, I doubt the compute will be left on the table for long.

H200 PCIe5 x 16 card anyone?

historical context Luddite

means the actual Luddite movement, not luddite the word as used today, there’s a bit more nuance there. Go on, read the wiki…

A historical context Luddite would probably be destroying datacentres presently, we might have a thing or two to learn from them.

Easy enough to put a repo on a usb drive if that’s what you want, or indeed if you build the folder structure you can just copy. Fine for the occasional install, if you’re doing it wholesale, Ansible.

First up… backups…

You’ve got all your data on a single 8TB external drive?

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.

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.

Think so ? I put these games down for a while and come back later, explore the new content, muck around for a while, and put them down again… Love 'em both, but not all the time.

Yup, very much make your own activities games, but both continue to grow. NMS especially just keeps bashing out free updates (Best Ongoing Game again at this years The Game Awards) and has monthly or so expeditions for the new things if you need more direction. Corvettes went over well.

Agreed, IIRC they have a free weekend every now and then. A couple of years back I gave it a spin, realized what I wasn’t missing, and went back to Elite Dangerous and No Man’s Sky. You know, working space games…

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.

Woot, competition!

how cheating (particularly single player) can be fun

Have you never played a game with unreasonable grind that saps all the fun out of it ? Often just to drive player hours and ‘engagement’. Multiplayer cheats however can die in a fire.

The tanks might go underground mitigating (perhaps) the pressure explosion risk as opposed to lithium fire risk, but the honking great tent is an issue. Should have a longer life than Li Ion and be repairable vs somewhat recyclable. At scaled production it could certainly be cheaper, but some of the newer immobile battery chemistries might beat it. Synthesized fuel also makes a lot of sense. We shall see. What certainly makes sense is microgrids and power self-sufficiency.

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was ‘Oh no, not again.’

Wonder how small you can scale these and retain efficiency, at twice the footprint (but I’m guessing a lot more volume) of a lithium grid battery, will we see these replacing home batteries down the line?