MudMan

Neat. Not the version I played, and arguably a lot of those issues were fixed in the PC port. But then, there are a lot more options for accurate hardware-level emulation and preservation of period-appropriate Amiga than the much muddier explosion of PC specs, so it’s weirdly a cleaner way to preserve an optimal version.

I’m never sure how much to push early releases like these, though. Is the clumsy one-unit-at-a-time approach to Dune 2 worth messing with? Or do you just go play the (extremely good) remaster of Command & Conquer at that point?

Don’t eat free to use sandwiches, either. Ew.

The UX is mostly garbage on those anyway.

Man, you must be a riot at parties.

Technically all sandwiches are proprietary. Don’t eat public sandwiches, we went through a pandemic, we should know better.

I guess that depends on the use case and how frequently both machines are running simultaneously. Like I said, that reasoning makes a lot of sense if you have a bunch of users coming and going, but the OP is saying it’s two instances at most, so… I don’t know if the math makes virtualization more efficient. It’d pobably be more efficient by the dollar, if the server is constantly rendering something in the background and you’re only sapping whatever performance you need to run games when you’re playing.

But the physical space thing is debatable, I think. This sounds like a chonker of a setup either way, and nothing is keeping you from stacking or rack-mounting two PCs, either. Plus if that’s the concern you can go with very space-efficient alternatives, including gaming laptops. I’ve done that before for that reason.

I suppose it’s why PC building as a hobbyist is fun, there are a lot of balance points and you can tweak a lot of knobs to balance many different things between power/price/performance/power consumption/whatever else.

OK, yeah, that makes sense. And it IS pretty unique, to have a multi-GPU system available at home but just idling when not at work. I think I’d still try to build a standalone second machine for that second user, though. You can then focus on making the big boy accessible from wherever you want to use it for gaming, which seems like a much more manageable, much less finicky challenge. That second computer would probably end up being relatively inexpensive to match the average use case for half of the big server thing. Definitely much less of a hassle. I’ve even had a gaming laptop serve that kind of purpose just because I needed a portable workstation with a GPU anyway, so it could double as a desktop replacement for gaming with someone else at home, but of course that depends on your needs.

And in that scenario you could also just run all that LLM/SD stuff in the background and make it accessible across your network, I think that’s pretty trivial whether it’s inside a VM or running directly on the same environment as everything else as a background process. Trivial compared to a fully virtualized gaming computer sharing a pool of GPUs, anyway.

Feel free to tell us where you land, it certainly seems like a fun, quirky setup etiher way.

Yeah, but if you’re this deep into the self hosting rabbit hole what circumstances lead to having an extra GPU laying around without an extra everything else, even if it’s relartively underpowered? You’ll probably be able to upgrade it later by recycling whatever is in your nice PC next time you upgrade something.

At this point most of my household is running some frankenstein of phased out parts just to justify my main build. It’s a bit of a problem, actually.

OK, but why?

Well, for fun and as a cool hobby project, I get that. That is enough to justify it, like any other crazy hobbyist project. Don’t let me stop you.

But in the spirit of practicality and speaking hypothetically: Why set it up that way?

For self-hosting why not build a few standalone machines and run off that instead? The reason to do this large scale is optimizing resources so you can assign a smaller pool of hardware to users as they need it, right? For a home set of two or three users you’d probably notice the fluctuations in performance caused by sharing the resources on the gaming VMs and it would cost you the same or more than building a couple reasonable gaming systems and a home server/NAS for the rest. Way less, I bet, if you’re smart about upgrades and hand-me-downs.

But I do like Linux. That’s a really silly thing to say. That’s why I was trying to get it in there even though I knew the support wasn’t all sorted. Screw that “if you don’t like it, leave” attitude.

And no, I won’t contribute to fixing the issues because I lack the technical skills to do so and the skills I can contribute they don’t need. That’s also silly, you can’t be arguing for mainstream adoption of a thing and simultaneously saying users should be out there fixing it themselves if they encounter an unaddressed hardware incompatibility.

And yes, it’s absolutely down to the manufacturer not making a Linux version of their drivers and dumb dedicated software. Absolutely. What am I supposed to do about that? It’s not a niche manufacturer, either, it’s a pretty popular one. As far as I know, none of the big corporate laptop manufacturers offer official Linux support (at least not Lenovo, Asus, MSI or Dell, that I know of). In fact, the indie manufacturers tend to offer better support, what with using less custom hardware and software and sometimes offering a built-in Linux install as an option to serve as a workaround for OEM fees.

Look, if you don’t want to hear about the issues people encounter with your OS of choice… fine, I guess. I don’t know why you’re emotionally invested in utilitarian pieces of software, but you do you. But if you hope that you’re going to be online having a fanclub about an operating system, of all things, and nobody is ever gonna show up saying “hey, I tried it and it kinda didn’t do it for me”… eh… maybe make it a private Discord channel instead, because that’s probably not gonna happen otherwise. That’s probably a reason why you don’t get Windows or MacOS fanclubs out there, because let me be clear, I would have just as many objections to dump into those, albeit for different reasons.

Like I told the guy accusing me of trolling, I’m not even trying to “trigger” anyone, it’s just that people will walk you through the same three basic troubleshooting options whenever you point out you bumped into a compatibility issue and it gets annoying after a while.

Agreed on the other thing, though. I actively want Linux on desktop/laptop to be better. I actively like many things about it already, which is why I was trying to set it up on this thing in the first place. I use it on other devices that have specific support for it, from SBCs to the Steam Deck. And I definitely also have issues, concerns and pet peeves with Windows, Android variants, MacOS, iOS, iPadOS and every other alternative out there.

I just don’t particularly care to stick to a single thing and will use whatever the path of least resistance is for each application. Anything else seems nuts. An OS is a utility, not a sports team. It’s like rooting for an AC manufacturer.

I’m… not impressed with the concept of disk partitioning, what a weird way to read that.

I’m impressed with the interface smartly picking up on what you’re trying to do, shrinking and growing partitions and setting up things automatically to specifically support a non-destructive install to coexist with other OSs because the idea that you’d be just testing a distro alongside Windows or something else is a specifically supported use case.

To each their own, but I can tell you I found people flagging all the issues I encountered online.

Hah. Nope. There’s a ton of custom features on hardware that need tweaking all over Windows laptops. There are entire forums dedicated to specific brands out there. None of this was much of a surprise, I had put off giving this a try because I had read about the hoops I’d have to jump through and been too lazy to try.

Nah, my point is there is no “dearth of knowledge”, there is a genuine lack of support and I said so at the off pretty openly in far less florid language.

But also, if it took a “guru” to get this stuff done that’d be a good argument against this stuff being viable for the mainstream, and about how useless the basic advice being provided would be, so it works for me either way.

Believe what you want. I actually would like to move some (more) of my devices over. I’m just not so married to any one OS to try super hard. I just use whatever works.

It’s kinda nuts to me that not everybody is on the same page with that.

I mean… yeah. Wiser, too.

Welcome to social media. That ship sailed like a decade ago. Also applies to both of us equally.

The third time.

I shrugged it off the first couple of times. Which, if I say so myself, was big of me, considering this has been going on for twenty five years. I’m exceedingly patient, if anything.

Look, it’s the age-old story of social media: your well-intentioned post with basic anecdote is the first time you bring it up, but the hundredth time the person you’re responding to has been in this exact conversation. They’re not snippy at you because they’re trolling or arrogant, they’ve just been having a dozen people tell them the same obviously wrong exact thing every five minutes for a while and are increasingly unwilling to go through the motions.

That’s a big, important lesson when you’re trying to make an online space grow, if you want to be constructive about it and bring this little spat back to topic.

Nah, I don’t have a problem at all. That’s my point. I never asked for help and got a bunch of condescending, inapplicable, very basic advice regardless.

I mean, call it what you want, that’s why I qualified it in the first place.

I’m not mad at them, but it’s been long enough that I do find it frustrating that you can’t share any degree of a technical problem or UX issue without having a bunch of people crawl from under every rock to share with you the same three pieces of Linux 101 advice.

Seriously, you guys need to stop trying to troubleshoot Linux’s shortcomings at people. I know. Everybody knows. If you don’t, that’s the first thing any tutorial will tell you. I’m not looking for technical help, just sharing an anecdote.

If you’re curious, no, I couldn’t do Pop because I needed some specific libraries and kernel modules to support this particular device’s power management and I/O quirks and those were only officially supported in a handful of distros, so I picked one of the ones with better documentation, and even that wasn’t meant for my specific hardware.

Not that it matters, because it’s a laptop with a iGPU and a dGPU, and the Intel iGPU was just fine out of the box, so getting the Nvidia dGPU to work well was way down my priority list for this exercise, since the device was meant mostly for web browsing and media consumption. Instead, I had issues with sleep mode, since that was related to those specific modifications, and I coudn’t figure out a way to make it wake from boot without locking up, which is a pretty big dealbreaker for a device on a battery. Plus the embedded audio controls had some issues, the touchpad was flaky and eventually trying to go through the process of getting that dGPU running exposed other compatibility troubles.

I was ready to roll back to Windows once I noticed the touchpad acceleration was messy out of the gate, honestly, that’s my bar for troubleshooting tolerance. So no, I didn’t fail to do a cursory Google search in 2020 and find out that Nvidia support is messy. I knew that my slightly nonstandard device was going to be a bit of a challenge, but was hoping to get lucky. Didn’t get lucky and went back to what works on it. It’s not a call for help, it’s just a thing that happened last time I tried to switch a device to Linux.

Yeah, no, not doing that either.

I mean, yeah, Linux ran leaner and felt a bit snappier in the OS and in like-for-like loads on Firefox, but the difference is a few dB, I can certainly live with it.

I’m not “set” on anything here, if I hadn’t had issues with compatibility I would have stuck with Linux on it. I really, really don’t mind either for most tasks.