• Anything that you can shove hardware into (CPU, RAM, HDDs, maybe a PCI slot), so any used workstation is a great start, and don’t bother splurging initially, just follow the quality tool rule and only buy when something becomes inadequate. If you want to jump straight into loud and noisy severs, you can pick up used servers for cheap like R730s which there’s a ton of out there. Just avoid 2.5" drive bays because 3.5" HDDS are way cheaper per Gb.

• Would recommend podman over docker as its matured to the point where it has a lot of better features like rootless, quadlets, etc that you might want to take advantage of in the future. OS is whatever linux you prefer, but I recommend you stay away from Ubuntu. If you want something RedHat but not as cutting edge as Fedora, I’ve heard OpenSUSE is pretty nice.

For apps, If you want to do HTTPS via GUI then npmplus is nice option, Otherwise caddy can do the same with text config. Rest is whatever you want to try out :)

EDIT: If you start making an *arr stack, I would recommend recyclarr to handle the quite expansive content filter settings for sonarr and radarr.

I hate to break the news but the issue with Bitwarden is that the client sucks total ass, and there are no drop in 3rd party replacements for the browser plugin.

Been running Vaultwarden for a while now and even though the sync implementation is nice and clean, it’s just not worth the end user experience.

This is really dumb when compared to literally every other password manager, open source and enterprise which does a much better job of actually being a password manager and not a glorified encrypted text file.

I’m eventually going to switch back to KeePassXC and just suggest setting a master password with Firefox’s builtin password manager for everyone else who just wants a painless user experience and not have to deal with syncing vaults.

How much does colocation end up costing?

I doubt it’d be worth it, but it would be funny to move my dated homelab servers next to some shiny new stuff and get SLA level internet.

NIMBY is usually more to do with perceived loss in value though no?

People don’t want AI datacenters because they are directly offloading energy costs to neighborhoods via substantially higher power bills. Which is happening because the demand is so high, they can’t compensate by building more power sources in the same time frame.

That and the poor reception to the AI market, which is wrecking jobs, the economy, etc.

Otherwise, datacenters were pretty well known for being built with very little resistance before this, especially since lots of providers, like Google, would fund geopower sources to power their datacenters which would add power to the grid with surplus.

I know people are reacting like its expected anyway because of the amount of espionage that goes on, but this is honestly more of a cold war era tactic.

Why would China risk souring relations right after a major diplomatic trip with some throw away gadgets that any competent military security would find immediately and proceed to document it?

China can just get that high level information via a million other ways including Trump himself. They probably have a truthsocial scrapper that automatically tells them exactly what Trump is gonna do next by deciphering his insane posts lol.

TPM microslop magic.

What’s even funnier is that we already have TCG, ISE, and SE drives that hardware encrypt AES256 by design, so you still get at least an instant delete option if you never bother to set a key.

Windows wants to double screw you over by never telling you it added a key, and then leaving you dead in the water if your TPM breaks, and then also failing to maintain their own TPM requirements making it completely useless lol.

Now all that high tech electronics jacking from the first Fast & Furious movie doesn’t look so dumb lol.

This is the best one by far lmao

I’m curious but has anyone’s business/employer actually bought or used these off the shelf “AI” solutions that are all running the same cloud model with a fancy system prompt + frontend?

Because I really have only seen ChatGPT, Claude, or sometimes Gemini in enterprise.

Actually for that matter, I don’t even know anyone personally who tried any of the ad spam ones from the superbowl.

The real use case for redroid lol

Lenovo running the show is what makes it viable, otherwise I would have thought it was a Google backed conspiracy to drain GrapheneOS resources on a product that would never release.

Tbh the mobile industry is long overdue for some competitive upgrades anyway. A lot of their underlying functionality has fallen far behind desktop OSs.

It’s funny because they’re trying to find ways to cut cloud costs by offloading to users, but when that’s not a concern, they shove everything into the cloud and then ensure no local running option is available or viable.

Linux will do more because Apple and every sillicon valley giant has collusion SLAs with eachother, no matter what they publicly claim.

There’s the MTT S80 (First PCIe Gen 5 GPU lol) which is the consumer grade version of Moore Thread’s enterprise GPUs like S4000, but the problem is that they trade off super cheap VRAM and PCIe bandwidth for low compute power compared to even antiquated stuff from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

They’re actually a great choice if you want to run AI/LLM stuff for really cheap, and Moore threads has their own CUDA knockoff called MUSA which iirc does have support in the various LLM backends available. Back when they released, it was going for something like $160 in China and ~$200-250 online. Could easily pool the VRAM, though finding a mobo+CPU combo with enough PCIe lanes to spare meant you’d most likely not be taking advantage of more than maybe 2 or 3 cards in one tensor parallel split.

China’s domestic processor production is still catching up, so even though they have access to high speed RAM and all the latest standards, they don’t have the cores to match.

Their last KX7000 x86 CPU was comparable to a skylake i5 or i7, but just with newer standards like DDR5 and PCIe gen 4. So they’re about 7 years behind based on that estimate.

You can still make a CI/CD pipeline that doesn’t self combust every 5 minutes lol.

laziness about having to go through and reinstall everything on a clean install

Package managers make this a breeze to the point that people upload their personal script to github so they can run one command to get all of their software and theming on a new PC lol.

No need to even go that far, just pop open the app “store” (everything is free lol) and just click away at everything you want. Can probably get most of your stuff in 10 minutes tops.

What even are the significant differences with different distros?

It boils down to how effective the user experience & preference is and what the backend is built on (which usually affects user experience & preference lol).

Mint is highly recommended because it cleans up a ton of the random stuff from Ubuntu upstream and maintains a clean and low cost (cpu/ram usage) desktop environment that’s very easy to use. It’s highly recommended for anyone who is new or inexperienced with linux or OSs in general and just wants to get on with life. The single downside is that its packages are not the latest and greatest, so its great for everything except gaming where you want the new stuff like drivers, proton upgrades, new features, etc.

Fedora is what Ubuntu was 15 years ago, which is best all around user experience. It chooses very sensible but cutting edge packages which gives you excellent performance benefits of new tech like BTRFS/XFS without losing out on stability. It’s also the distro Linus himself uses because he finds it easy to just install and again, get on with life lol. Fedora also has excellent user docs and forums which is great if you need help with something. Only downside is I think you have to flick a switch (or run a command) to enable all video codecs because they don’t ship it on their main package repository since H264 & HEVC have weird licensing issues.

Bazzite is a downstream of Fedora Silverblue, which is an atomic distro that makes it really hard to screw something up by using a read only root and rollback-able updates, similar to Android and SteamOS. It was specifically designed to make gaming on handhelds an easy out of box experience so you don’t have to manually set up stuff like touchscreen keyboards or power settings on non PC hardware. You can run it on PC if you’d like the benefit of the rollback image system which can unbork your machine super easy, though it already is quite hard to bork because the root filesystem is read only, so apps are installed in a similar way as Android apps (Flatpak).

Learning Linux is actually quite intuitive (thankfully), and everything from the GUI perspective is mostly the same, if not an outright improvement in several areas. I would highly recommend playing with the live install of whichever distro you pick along with the desktop environment to get a feel for how it looks before you commit to an install.

Desktop Environments are also not tied to distros. You can basically choose any DE on any distro (like Mint’s Cinnamon on Fedora), but the two biggest ones are GNOME (Mac like) and KDE (Windows like). I think KDE is way better than GNOME, but you can play with both & more to see which one you prefer.

Your main issue to figure out when permanently switching is if there is any software or process that you rely on in Windows that would be different in Linux. For me it was switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice (there are also more, like OnlyOffice), which was completely painless since it was like 95% the same and could open up docx just fine.

The other possible ones could be:

• Adobe stuff (some stuff like PS works, but it’s a bit involved to setup the first time)
• Games that use kernel level anticheat (big nono in linux because it breaks security)

The second one is really what’s keeping a lot of people from making a permanent change which I’m hoping Valve can change with the upcoming Steam Machine because even for Windows, its like running a rootkit that really should not have that level of access to your PC.

I don’t play any games that utilize it, but you might and it won’t work on linux until the publisher decides to let it: https://areweanticheatyet.com/. The comments are usually outdated back from when the game first released, so as long is it’s green or blue, it should run out of box.

Some publishers (Epic Games mostly) are also just dicks that don’t use kernel level in some games but still choose not to enable linux support when compiling their game, despite all the major anitcheat vendors supporting linux and even mac.

The good news is that for everything else, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll actually see an increase in performance from Windows. The biggest one for me was World of Warships which went from 2 minutes load times down to just 30 seconds on a hard drive, and about 15-20%+ FPS even when on an SSD.

It would be like the 2007 financial/housing crisis.

You could get amazingly huge and quality houses, cars, stores, etc for dirt cheap but that’s because a metric ton of people were layed off and had to sell their assets to make ends meet.

The AI bubble is compounded by the fact that it’s primarily propped up by ~1 trillion USD in private credit, which for all intents and purposes is basically just the same system as CDOs which caused the 2007/8 crash.

If AI blows, all that debt comes back null, and since all other major investments are based on speculation and multiplied debt obligations, the economy collapses (again).

Granted, if you’re lucky enough to not fall to the effects of such a crash, components will be dirt cheap and great time to buy.

But if you’re layed off, you’re looking at potentially a year+ of unemployment, in which case it won’t matter if you can get a 5090 for $300 because you’ll be more concerned with surviving without an income.

Like… what exactly lol?

Most discussions about Linux here devolve into distro sledging lol.

Even the joke stuff like Nvidia is from a bygone era.

My personal recommendation is Fedora, but any competent distro is miles more user friendly than current windows 11.

If they had tried at least we’d get a 1/5 chance that the windows market stranglehold dies lol.

People thinking this isn’t a monopoly enforcement action in disguise are the same people who think banning Huawei was justified.

Google’s one mistake was that they sold Motorolla to Lenovo, who ran it as low cost shovelware to make the mobile phone market in the US not look like a complete oligopoly. They kept their cost low by using complete stock Google ROMs while every other OEM exited the market.

Until recently when Lenovo properly built up their hardware lineup and started jumping ship to GrapheneOS the moment Google started clamping down.