I agree with Stallman and others on this sort of thing, it should be illegal for any public institution to use proprietary, corporate software in any capacity.

Public institutions are supposed to serve and benefit the public good first and foremost. The idea that they can do that equally well or better by partnering with mega-corps who’s only fundamental drive is to generate as much profit as possible for their shareholders, is idiotic.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo flatpak update -y

Was this the guy who had that blog post about Europe being “ruined” by immigrants?

Don’t let this nut sully your views on actual leftists, most of us are pretty sensible. ❤️

They are very likely a bot anyways lol

If you’re using a 30+ year old computer in the modern day, you’ve already sacrificed security.

The price and availability of a 15 year old computer is almost the same as a 30 year old computer, you can get a fully functional 1st gen i5 PC that will sprint circles around the highest end 90’s PC for $40. Honestly, most people are just e-wasting computers that old, I’m sure you could easily get them for free, hell, lots of people would pay you to take them off their hands.

You’re right, it’s way better.

No prob. Most of these things won’t take long, a few mins each. I tried to order them roughly by easy to difficult/time consuming.

Good luck!

1. Check your thermals on your CPU and GPU, make sure they aren’t running too hot.
2. Turn off your computer and unplug it from the wall. Then check all your physical connections from the power supply to the motherboard and your graphics card. Everything should be fully seated in the sockets and firmly locked in. Loose connectors can cause power delivery issues that freeze or crash a system. In rare cases they can short out, causing severe damage to the components, or even a fire. So it’s important to do anyways.
3. Check your motherboard manufacture’s website and make sure you’re using the latest BIOS version. Your BIOS screen will tell you what your exact model number is and the current BIOS version.
4. Check to make sure you’re not running out of system RAM.
5. Use Furmark to stress test your GPU. If it runs in stress test mode for at least 4 hours straight without any crashes, that’s a good sign that your GPU isn’t the issue.
6. Use a CPU stress test program to do the same to your CPU. I actually like to go to Lichess.org, open their analysis board tool Lichess Analysis Tool, go into the settings and max out the move search depth, memory limit, and maximum lines calculated. Then I just make 15-20 random moves. The chess engine will sit there and calculate as long as you have that tab open on your local machine, and it will max out every core on your CPU 100% but there are dozens of other ways to stress your CPU, so feel free to search for them.
7. You may have a lemon of a CPU or GPU chip. All chips are “binned” meaning they are tested at the factory and depending on how they perform, they are accepted or rejected within certain boundaries, but there is a range. Some chips just barely pass the minimum standards brand new. Since all electronics degrade over time, especially modern chips with billions of microscopic transistors, if your chip already was barely good enough to pass the minimum specs when it was fresh out of the box, it can start to become unstable even under normal workloads, let alone more heavy use like what you’re describing. Undervolting and underclocking can help fix this. Using your motherboard’s settings or 3rd party tools (like LACT for GPUs), you can limit the maximum voltage and/or maximum frequency of your chips. This not only will reduce the thermal output of your chips, making them run cooler and slowing the degradation process, but often will make them run much more stable.

Totally agree, I threw a quick filter on some public domain, actual human artwork, and cropped it square. Took me as long as it would have taken to generate that slop logo.

Here’s the original source: Citation

For the love of anything even mildly good or wholesome…enough of the fucking AI slop images!

Finamp has been my goto for my music collection for several years. I know there are better solutions, but I’m not hardcore, I just want a simple app that streams my music from the server reliably.

The only thing that is a pain is getting all the tags and metadata correct, but there are lots of good apps to help with that also.

Same conclusion for me. Been using Linux for years, Mint is the only distro I’ve used that #JustWorks in my experience.

I use LMDE as my personal laptop, it’s rock stable.

It’s easy to slop together the 10 Billionth remake of Pacman, Minesweeper, Kanban board, ToDo list, etc.

Actually making something innovative, unique, interesting, and useful is tough. It requires skill, knowledge, creativity, and passion to keep at it long after the high of vibe coding your first solitaire game fades away.

If LLMs are blockchain 2.0, then Vibe coding is its NFT fad. Just a way to take advantage of useful idiots who think being a software engineer consists of typing code all day as fast as possible.

Same for me. I clearly separate my “experiemental” machines from my “just works” machines now.

My laptop runs LMDE, my servers are mostly Debian 13, a handful of Ubuntu Server in there. My gaming rig is Nobara Linux, which is just Glorious Egg roll’s gaming-optimized Fedora build. When I first set it up a few years ago, I had everything all customized, themes, fonts, icons, fancy desktop/window effects, etc.

I actually considered just going with something vanilla recently, not because I have had any major issues with my current set up, but just because I don’t feel like tinkering with it anymore.

My tinkering desire has shifted more and more towards server/enterprise infrastructure and DevOps automation.

I’m older now, my career has taken off, and with that comes more responsibilities and mental energy required during the workday, then family obligations through the week/month, etc. I find myself with less time and mental energy to just tinker and play with tech. So when I do find myself with a bit of free time, I want to maximize it and work on stuff that both helps with my actual career, and helps me get more stuff self-hosted for myself and my family.

Way back in college, I used to spend more time tweaking my PC’s overclock than actually gaming xD

It’s a lightweight, independent distro for power users. It’s also currently one of the very few distros still offering an official 32 bit version out of the box.

I use it on my oldest and lowest power machines. It’s snappy and stable. Plus, the name is badass, for whatever that’s worth lol.

Ryzen 7 5800 X3D Radeon RX 9070XT 32GB of DDR4 system memory.

What local models have you been using? And what hardware are you running them on? I’ve been playing with local LLMs a bit for exactly your use case.

I have zero interest in vibe coding or full agentic workflows. But having a local LLM generate a Bash script to help me automate parts of my home lab infrastructure would be nice.

Been using it for two years on my side business laptop, works awesome. Plug and play functionality with most the apps I need, and rock stable.

Slow and steady, with occasional spikes when a government or mega-corp does something particularly terrible.

Lol, awesome. 🎉🌈✊🏳️‍🌈🎊 FOSS is for everybody!

Nice, I’ll have to give it a try.