Nice Thinkpad! I recently installed Linux Mint Debian Edition on one of the more recent Thinkpads. But the other suggestions here are fine as well. Mind an older Laptop with a spinning harddisk inside might not be as snappy as a people expect these days.

Not sure about the guides, but there are entire distributions specifically made for this: https://www.thinstation.org/

I’ve heard they have government-approved VPN providers. And companies there use VPNs for their job. They’ll also do business on platforms which are blocked on the regular Chinese internet. Of course business is guided by the communist party so you might have someone keeping an eye on your company VPN (mis)use. People who went there told me they’re more lenient with foreigners. Your European/American company’s corporate VPN might work well, you might also experience connections being dropped and the Great Firewall messing with it. And there are some attempts at circumventing blockage, like TOR’s Snowflake, though all of this is a cat and mouse game, some (illegal) thing works for a while and then they shut it down and you’ll move to the next one. Though as a citizen of an oppressive regime you’d better think twice before engaging in a cat and mouse game with authorities.

Didn’t they just release their Ryzen AI Software as a preview for Linux? I think that was a few days ago. I don’t know about the benchmarks as of today, but seems they’ve been working on drivers, power reporting, toolkit and have been mainlining stuff into the kernel so the situation improves.

I think CUDA (Nvidia) is still dominating the AI projects out there. The more widespread and in-use projects sometimes have backends for several ecosystems and they’ll run on Nvidia, AMD or Intel or a CPU. Same for the libraries which build the foundation. But not all of them. And most brand-new tech-demos I see, are written for Nvidia’s CUDA. And I’ll have to jump through some hoops to make it work on different hardware and sometimes it works well, sometimes it’s not optimized for anything but Nvidia hardware.

It’d be a really bad situation. I mean we rely on VPNs and tunnels a lot. For half the people doing home-office, logging into the company’s VPN is the first thing in the morning. Field crew relies on them. That’s an additional layer of protection in the ATM of your bank…

It’d wreck half the economy in the process. Or “they” need to outlaw specific things. Like private VPNs. And gather a list of private VPN providers and ban them via a great firewall. That’s possible. And would make life worse in a country. It’s possible to circumvent these measures. And it’s difficult to discern traffic and distinguish VPN traffic from other encrypted traffic so the country might want to implement some harsh measures as well. A police force knocking on people’s doors if they suspect them to evade law and demand they show their computer and smartphones.

So in conclusion your best option is probably to move to a different place if you can afford to, once that becomes reality. (Edit: Maybe your best option is to protest this, do campaigns, call your representative and try to stop it. So we dont get into this situation in the fist place.)

Btw, the proper place to mount filesystems is either /media or /mnt. I wouldn’t create a directory called /Volumes in Linux. And pay attention, these are case-sensitive and most (not all) system directories have agreed on using lower-case letters only. And “volume” is kind of a Windows and MacOS-term anyway, I rarely see Linux-people refer to media and filesystems that way.

I got a nice Dell Latitude 7390 for like 250€ a year ago. I usually just have an eye on the sales page of my local laptop refurbisher and go for the best Dell or Lenovo laptop in my price range. Since that’s mostly devices returned from leasing by businesses, they’re the more serviceable models than regular consumer models. But serviceability is somewhat limited these days. You’d have to check individually how many RAM slots are available (if any) and whether the BIOS accepts random wifi cards.

Geary is very polished and shiny. I ended up not using it because I have a lot of folders, automatic rules to sort things, different signatures and addresses and some of the advanced email stuff isn’t in there. But definitely worth a look for someone with a simpler private email inbox. And so much more intuitive to use than for example Thunderbird.

There’s always a possibility of someone posting arbitrary content when a platform allows user content or combines content from many sources. I mean we do have moderation here and illegal content is supposed to be removed or flagged. However as the operator of some internet service, you are ultimately responsible for what’s on your instance. So you definitely do need to make an effort to stay in control. Btw, there are possible compromises, such as using an allow-list of instances you federate with, so you don’t pull content from sources you don’t trust and didn’t approve.

Uh good question. Seems people recommend Tipp10 and it’s in the repositories. Looks like for way older people, though. I remember playing Tux Typing that’s more colorful with words falling down. Idk. I hated these programs as a kid. 10 finger typing is a boring and tedious task. But I’m not sure about the didactics of it. My knowledge on when you should learn proper typing is a bit outdated. Maybe not yet at that age. Just give them some motivation to type something (anything)? So they start trying and understand how the keyboard is useful?

With the mouse… Well I just picked that up on my own. We played PuttPutt and Monkey Island 2. And obviously playing point and click adventures is going to give you the needed skills fast. Though you really need to be able to read for that and that might take 2 years of school? Most of the computer isn’t accessible without being able to read. You can draw, though. Or play games with speech output. (And non-educational games like racing games or whatever works without language)

And by the way, I had another look at it and some people curate educational games for Linux:

• https://www.icefun.ch/
• KDE for Kids
• KDE Education Project
  and I remember Debian has some metapackages with education software as well.

I think kids find ways to play and tinker with stuff. I’d give them an office suite to practice writing letters or advertisements or whatever they come up with, something to draw… maybe not Gimp because that’s not easy to use… I’ve seen people give their kids an instant messenger which connects to their dad/mom so they’re incentivised to type something. And then of course we have games. From Supertux, PlanetPenguin Racer, Tuxkart to commercial games. There are some kids games in the repos. Kartoffelknülch, drawing programs. Programming languages to learn coding with puzzle pieces and blocks or animate Turtles. There are educational games, at least my local library has some and I played some as a kid. But maybe at least try to balance the gaming. There’s so much more interesting stuff in computers. And then of course you could put some content into some directories, I think unrestricted internet access isn’t great at 6yo and the computer will be empty without, so idk. Maybe put some templates there, ideas what to draw, music or audiobooks or whatever fits the purpose…

I think they should be roughly in a similar range for selfhosting?! They’re both power-efficient. And probably have enough speed for the average task. There might be a few perks with the ThinkCentre Tiny. I haven’t looked it up but I think you should be able to fit an SSD and a harddrive and maybe swap the RAM if you need more. And they’re sometimes on sale somewhere and should be cheaper than a RasPI 5 plus required extras.

I’m a bit below 20W. But I custom-built the computer a long time ago with an energy-efficient mainboard and a PicoPSU. I think other options for people who don’t need a lot of harddisks or a graphics card include old laptops or Mini-PCs. Those should idle at somewhat like 10-15W. It stretches the definition of “desktop pc” a bit, but I guess you could place them on a desk as well 😉

Linux Antivirus is a very specific niche. It’s mostly there to scan for Windows viruses and malware. So your Linux mailserver for example (or storage system) filters those out before they appear on your employee’s computers.

What you’d instead do in Linux is harden your webserver and services, keep the webservices you host up to date and have some monitoring so you detect known rootkits or if your DNS server gets abused for a DDoS attack. And keep an eye on supply chain attacks if you’re a developer. Because that’s how attacks against Linux work. I’ve been scolded for saying this on Lemmy, but to this date, desktop computer malware isn’t really a thing with Linux. Attacks almost exclusively target webservers and Internet of Things devices, routers and so on.

So an Antivirus on a desktop computer isn’t going to do much, due to the lack of malware which works that way. And you’d still be vulnerable if someone hands you a malicious bash script to delete your home directory. It could however do something if you run Proton or Wine and run Windows programs in Linux.

If you want to do something for security, learn not to copy-paste stuff into the command line. Don’t run executables from random places of the internet. Try to rely on your distribution’s package repository. Do automatic updates, and generally do timely updates, especially with the webbrowser and stuff that’s reachable from outside. Set strong passwords. And don’t neglect your backups. Your harddisk is bound to fail anyway, eventually. I think that’s going to get you 99% of the way. Installing an antivirus is only the next 0.2%.

There’s another community for this: !localllama@sh.itjust.works
Though we mostly discuss the news and specific questions there, beginner questions are a bit more rare.

I think you already got a lot of good answers here, LMStudio, OpenWebUI, LocalAI…
I’d like to add KoboldCpp that’s kind of made for gaming/dialogue, but it can do everything. And from my experience it’s very easy to set up and bundles everything into one program.

I think they want you to add something like

guest ok = yes  

Isn’t there some example config installed along with samba, which you can modify or copy-paste? I think that’s more likely to be laid out correctly than a random internet tutorial which might be outdated or for another distro or another use-case…

Indeed, the story is funny and weird. Though he used to share lots of interesting and funny perspectives. And these days the Youtube comments underneath are way more funny and on point than all his content.

Idk, I can’t find that supposed Bluesky and Mastodon discussions, I think he made that up. And he fails to mention the email address is just a text field, people can put anything in there. And while highlighting it, he also completely fails to spot the timezone which is right next to it. And that’s set to UTC-4 so America east coast. And as a blogger/influencer he could at least have sent a mail and see if it bounces before reporting on it… And then he invents what the reviewer’s thought process was according to him, while the real next joke is their nationality, but he doesn’t spot that either. So I don’t know what to make of this. Sure he has a community and reach, and brings attention to niche things. But his own take on it tends to be wrong(?) and not in an inspiring way… In the old days he used to play devil’s advocate and I think that was extremely on point. But you can’t really fabricate “facts” and argue against that, because it turns it from a sarcastic, Socratic dialogue into just framing, spiked with misinformation and the next 15 minutes are just rambling and bullshit… And I think that’s a bit sad because we know he’s able to do more than that. And there’s no shortage of people rambling and talking bullshit, so there is no need for him to jump on it as well. It turns him from the troll he used to be into just your average anti-woke nut without any originality, just a Linux theme slapped on top…

Did Lunduke now entirely jump on that bandwagon? Seems he now does 3 videos a week “calling out” wokeness and “extreme” leftists and it’s become quite monothematic.

Fair enough. I mean I’d pay about 200€ a year in electricity to run 3 efficient computers. And my VPS is only 73€ and I never have to pay for replacement parts (SSDs, harddisks) which I had to replace at home. And then they have gigabit network, low latency, a proper IP address, it didn’t fail yet so their reliability >99.6% seems to be correct. And that’s all way better than what I have at home. So it’s a no-brainer to go for that. But your calculation might be different.

I mean ultimately there is no harm in trying. If you have 3 old computers laying around, you might as well try setting up a kubernetes cluster. I think it’s going to prove difficult to handle the IP addresses but I’m not an expert on high availability and gaming clients.

But doesn’t that require some software-defined networking or a special network setup? I’m pretty sure with the average home internet connection, you’ll fail over to the replica at your friend’s home. But that has an entirely different IP address and the game client will not handle that gracefully. It’s going to disconnect. And you need to do some DNS as well to always point at the active server and forbid caching. In a datacenter or enterprise setting, sure. you’ll just reroute the traffic and nobody will notice.