Pumpkin Escobar

Similar to previous reply about MATE with font size changes, I do that with plasma. I hadn’t seen plasma big screen you linked, I’ll definitely try that one out. I’ve wondered about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_Mobile? Like these sort of niche projects don’t always get a lot of attention, if the bigscreen project doesn’t work out, I’d bet the plasma mobile project is fairly active and given the way it scales for displays might work really well on a tv

Speaking of scaling since you mentioned it. I have noticed scaling in general feels a lot better in Wayland. If you’d only tried it in X11 before, might want to see if Wayland works better for you.

Coming from c# then typescript and nextjs, rye feels very intuitive and like a nice bridge / gateway drug into python.

Lan-mouse looks great but keep in mind that there’s no network encryption right now. There is a GitHub ticket open and the developer seems eager to add encryption. It’s just worth understanding that all your keystrokes are going across the network unencrypted.

More than distro hopping maybe try out a zen kernel or compiling kernel yourself and changing kernel config and scheduler, or a newer version of the stock kernel?

I’m not super current on what’s in each kernel but I’d expect latest mainline to handle newer processors better than some of the older stable kernels in some of the more mainstream slower releasing distros.

Ran Asahi for several months, tried it out again recently. It’s good/fine, I just don’t love fedora.

There’s some funkiness with the more complicated install, the AI acceleration doesn’t work, no thunderbolt / docking station.

MacBooks are great hardware but I don’t think they’re the best option for Linux right now. If you’re never going to boot into macOS then I’d look for x13, new Qualcomm, isn’t there a framework arm64 option now or was that a RISC module?

I’m also assuming you’re not looking to do any gaming? Because gaming on ARM is not really a thing right now and doesn’t feel like it will be for a long while.

When they’re not recording your desktop in an unencrypted database for AI, boot-looping your computer with bad patches or showing ads in your start menu, they’re disabling your account for calling family to see if they’re still alive. Damn.

Taking ollama for instance, either the whole model runs in vram and compute is done on the gpu, or it runs in system ram and compute is done on the cpu. Running models on CPU is horribly slow. You won’t want to do it for large models

LM studio and others allow you to run part of the model on GPU and part on CPU, splitting memory requirements but still pretty slow.

Even the smaller 7B parameter models run pretty slow in CPU and the huge models are orders of magnitude slower

So technically more system ram will let you run some larger models but you will quickly figure out you just don’t want to do it.

Respect, but…

I’ve been tempted to try and install plasma mobile on a tablet.

Why no arch install?

Nah. There are some nvidia issues with wayland (that are starting to get cleared up), and nvidia’s drivers not being open-source rubs some people the wrong way, but getting nvidia and cuda up and running on linux is pretty easy/reliable in my experience.

WSL is a bit different but there are steps to get that up and running too.

Agree with others, this guide is a bit more work than you probably need. I don’t really run windows much anymore but I did have an easier time with WSL like the other poster mentioned.

And just to check, are you planning on fine-tuning a model? If so then the whole anaconda / miniconda, pytorch, etc… path makes sense.

But if you’re not fine-tuning and you just want to run a model locally, I’d suggest ollama. If you want a UI on top of it, open-webui is great.

Asahi only partially supports the M3 and I guess now the M4 is out (though only in iPad)?

Real answer, learn how to paste several code snippets from stack overflow into a ChatGPT window and ask it to do what you need. Sprinkle in some copilot to tweak as needed. Congrats, Mr Programmer.

Just a note, the orange pi drivers are not in great shape. It’s getting better but I have a cluster of raspberry pi’s for development, bought an orange pi without first checking out much about them and it’s rough. Rockchip CPUs are great, and the driver / firmware situation is getting better, but something I’d read up on before buying one.

I’d still look at the N100, it’s about 2.5x the performance of raspberry pi 5, and being x86 you have more options than arm.

There are a lot of tiny PCs these days that can output 4k video and audio. Look for something with an N100 or N200 CPU if you want to go as cheap as possible, they tend to be super-cheap and perform well. I’ve got one of the GMTecs and this wireless keyboard+mouse, works really well from the couch.

There are cheaper/other options but to get you started: https://www.amazon.com/GMKtec-Windows-Computer-Business-G3-dp-B0CQ4XQ2WG/dp/B0CQ4XQ2WG https://morefine.com/collections/pc-box (specifically the M9)

I’m far from an expert in init systems, but there are some benefits to declarative approaches for configuration. It’s one of the main reasons yaml and toml are as popular as they are. The short version is, declarative configuration tends to be less verbose, and the declarative contract defines what state you want things to be in, not how to get there which makes it easier on the person writing the unit file, and on the implementers of systemd in that there’s a smaller surface-area to test

Generally declarative:

• requires less verbose configuration files, less room for error
• is easier to document and easier to understand
• leaves the implementers more freedom to improve their system as long as they live up to the agreed-upon contract
• is easier for implementers to test/validate. They don’t need to support a scripting language and every single crazy thing someone might try with one but still consider valid

Got hyprland running on the macbook, have tested it out on desktop. Not quite the daily driver, plasma 6 on X is still the norm there, but I think as soon as synergy works in Wayland I’ll make the switch everywhere

Looks like several reports / duplicates and like they’ve zeroed in on the problematic commit - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482687.

Good to hear that. At least it’s not an “only me” problem so hopefully we see a fix soon.