Russ

As long as it is done properly and honest, I have nothing against a “Pro” and a “Contra” article.

Neither do I, personally. Though I am certainly less than inclined enjoy an article where the author is oddly preachy/“holier-than-thou”, sayings things such as you’re not a “real” programmer unless you sacrifice your health debugging segfaults at 3AM or have done the handmade hero challenge (certainly an interesting series to watch, but one that I have zero interest in replicating). Yet the author accuses copilot of having a superiority complex. I cannot say for sure, however I would assume if the article was in favor of AI rather than against, then there would definitely be comments about exactly this.

The overarching tone of the article seems like if it were written as a direct comment toward a user instead, it would run afoul of beehaw’s (and surely other instances’) rules, or at the least come really close to skirting the line - and I don’t mean the parts where the author is speaking of/to copilot.

This can sometimes come at the cost of intuitiveness however. As an example that just happened to me the other day, I was using Pinta which uses libadwaita and had opened an image to make some modifications to it.

All was going well until I wanted to save a new copy of it (and not override the original). The toolbar has all of these functions on it, open, save, undo/redo, etc… but not Save As.

Apparently there’s a tiny little overflow button on the far right side, click it and you get a whole bunch of functions - one of them being the holy “Save As” option I was looking for. I almost went down the route of making a copy of the image outside Pinta and then just overwriting the original.

Apparently the idea of making a copy of an image is blasphemy. Even Microsoft Word when they had first moved to the Ribbon UI made the save button have a little dropdown right under the save option to reveal Save As.

Don’t get me wrong, I love how some libadwaita apps look. Mission Center for example? Chef’s Kiss - but it’s a very simple application that all I need to do is open it to have a quick look at the very pretty looking graphs. Although the latest update seems to have gotten rid of being able to have the sidebar open persistently (now taking an extra click to change between performance graphs)… But I still need to double check to see if that’s intended vs being a bug before I judge that too harshly.

Last Epoch! Haven’t had a lot of free time for gaming, so my progression of the season is slow - but I’m having a good time with it so far. Season 2 is definitely quite the breath of fresh air.

I do wonder why Valve hasn’t enabled it by default. It’s only defaulted on SteamOS and in fact, I believe they removed the option to turn it off on SteamOS recently…

A lot of Rocket League! Additionally I’ve been having a pretty good time with Star Trucker.

Then recently I’ve been streaming Helldivers 2 from my PC to my Deck while it’s connected to the living room TV, which has been fun.

Try resetting your Firefox profile. Sometimes a weird setting can break browsers in spectacular ways.

This was a big one for me, for the longest time I could not figure out why I couldn’t get YouTube to play videos over 1080p for me in Firefox on my PC, it ended up being some weird setting that I changed in about:config (I sadly cannot recall which one) a long time ago - but I’d always copied my Firefox profile with me so that bad setting stuck around.

Oh wow, I didn’t expect another release so quickly! Props to the COSMIC team! I can’t recall where the roadmap for the features and their targeted releases went, but I hope we can get Night Light/Blue Light filtering soon.

I also did not know they had a Mastodon account, thanks for the shout so that I could give 'em a follow.

Not really a fan of the author’s attitude at the start (I’m not quite sure how I’d describe it, but it certainly feels off…) - however I do agree with the premise. Even if Microsoft stops allowing kernel level anti-cheat to happen (and honestly I’ll believe it when I see it), that doesn’t mean that game developers/publishers who are hostile to Linux players are suddenly going to go “Oh! Well in that case…”

I’d be incredibly happy to be wrong in this case, but as of how the current landscape is, I just don’t see it changing. They’ll just find some other BS reason to exclude Linux players.

I stopped purchasing games that weren’t compatible with Linux long ago, and the one holdover I had was Destiny 2 - but the game’s major story has come to an end, which makes it a great time for me to drop it too.

IIRC they also just recently launched a new setting that allows you to permanently set the target resolution for all games (this might still only be in the beta branch though).

Previously you had to go into each game’s settings from Steam, and change the resolution there (which might be how you missed it).

It depends on who you’re referring to as a casual user. My mother for example would certainly have a hard time with it, then figuring out the key to bring up the boot menu (and being faced with a scary dialog that they’ve never seen), then selecting the right device, then likely being faced with GRUB which would also look scary to her, and by then she’d be overwhelmed before even getting to the install portion.

I’d recommend using ROCM through a Distrobox container, personally I use this Distrobox container file and it has suited all of my needs with Stable Diffusion so far.

That is, if you’re still interested in it - I could totally understand writing it off after what happened 😅

I usually just get by with Alacritty and Zellij, pairs pretty well together.

Nowadays I primarily just go with Arch, it works “fine enough” for my use cases (software dev and gaming) and the AUR truly does just about have everything that I’ve ever wanted to install.

That is not to say that it doesn’t have its issues though, a while back ago I was using EndeavourOS and my PC completely locked up (seemed like a kernel panic) in the middle of pacman running a system upgrade and it borked the whole install. I haven’t gotten around to migrating my home folder to its own partition (it is in its own btrfs subvol though), so I just went with installing Arch and choosing to keep the btrfs home subvolume so that the base system was replaced, yet my home folder was preserved. I’m sure that I could’ve fixed the issue in a chroot, but it was easier to just wipe everything outside of my home folder and just start fresh.

I am heavily interested in Atomic systems, the above issue being one of the bigger reasons, but I would continuously run into walls when trying to use non-flatpak software. Most of the Atomic distros have a way to effectively spin your own image, but at the moment I just don’t have the time to learn how to do it. NixOS fell into a similar boat for me, Nixpkgs is quite large but I’d have things randomly break because they’re expecting a FHS compliant layout (such as some of my dev tools) and while I’m sure I could eventually learn how to fix it, Nix’s docs are… not the best, and I ran into time constraints again.

I’ll eventually circle back to reviewing Atomic distros and spinning up my own custom image once things in my life settle down a bit, but there’s just too much chaos for me to justify throwing another wrench into it when Arch for the most part does what I need it to do.

My desktop also used to have a Nvidia GPU in it, and is one of the reasons why I started using Arch in the first place - they were pretty much always the first to get the Nvidia driver updates. Thankfully I switched to AMD (a 6700 XT) about a year ago and that specifically hasn’t been an issue (and allowed me to explore more distros without having to worry about how the Nvidia installation/update process was - its not really complicated on any of the distros, but its an additional step unless you use something like Pop that has the drivers preinstalled).

However I do also use Fedora on my old MacBook, I tend to only use it for lightweight browsing and occasionally SSH’ing into some systems and I’ve quite enjoyed Fedora so far.

I try to keep all of the distros I’ve tried out, with their current versions and previous versions (if it makes sense), such as:

• Arch
• NixOS
• Fedora
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Pop!_OS
• Bazzite (and their friends Aurora & Bluefin)
• Even Windows 10 >_>

I’ve stopped distro hopping as much as I used to, but I do keep a much smaller partition around for playing with another distro if I want to (such as the latest test version of Pop that includes the COSMIC epoch alpha release). I’d say that you definitely don’t need a 128GB flash drive, but the last 16GB flash drive I was using pretty much died and when I went to get a new one, the difference between 16/32/64/128 was negligible enough that I just decided to get a 128 one and never deal with storage issues on it again. Plus, you can tell the Ventoy installer to leave some free space for a non-ISO partition to keep other stuff on it as well.

They’re only just now cancelling that ridiculous fee? I swear I thought they cancelled that dumb idea a bit ago.

You’ve opened a door that you cannot close, Unity.

Can confirm, Ventoy is fantastic! I just keep one 128GB USB drive with a ton of ISOs on it and that does the trick!

Hmm, gotcha. I just tried out a fresh copy of text-gen-webui and it seems like the latest version is borked with ROCM (I get the CUDA error: invalid device function error).

My next recommendation then would be LM Studio which to my knowledge can still output an OpenAI compatible API endpoint to be used in SillyTavern - I’ve used it in the past before and I didn’t even need to run it within Distrobox (I have all of the ROCM stuff installed locally, but I generally run most of the AI stuff in distrobox since it tends to require an older version of Python than Arch is currently using) - it seems they’ve recently started supporting running GGUF models via Vulkan, which I assume probably doesn’t require the ROCM stuff to be installed perhaps?

Might be worth a shot, I just downloaded the latest version (the UI has definitely changed a bit since I last used it) and just grabbed a copy of the Gemma model and ran it, and it seemed to work without an issue for me directly on the host.

The advanced configuration settings no longer seem to directly mention GPU acceleration like it used to, however I can see it utilizing GPU resources in nvtop currently, and the speed it was generating at (the one in my screenshot was 83 tokens a second) couldn’t have possibly been done on the CPU so it seems to be fine on my side.

Ah, strange. I don’t suppose you specifically need a Fedora container? If not, I’ve been using this Ubuntu based distrobox container recipe for anything that requires ROCM and it has worked flawless for me.

If that still doesn’t work (I haven’t actually tried out kobolcpp yet), and you’re willing to try something other than kobolcpp, then I’d recommend the text-generation-webui project which supports a wide array of model types, including the GGUF types that Kobolcpp utilizes. Then if you really want to get deep into it, you can even pair it with SillyTavern (it is purely a frontend for a bunch of different LLM backends, text-generation-webui is one of the supported ones)!

What card do you use? I have a 6700XT and getting anything with ROCM running for me requires that I pass the HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0 environmental variable to the related process, otherwise it just refuses to run properly. I wonder if it might be something similar for you too?

I did the same move for similar reasons! Although I still keep windows around on another SSS - and even the Windows Nvidia drivers were being funky for me.

Nvidia shares a lot of logic between their Windows and Linux driver as far as I’m aware, so I suppose it makes sense.