Knoppix is a fun one :) Didn’t know it was independent.

Can you name 10 base/independent distros?

Mostly, I’ve only had minor issues: Old packages on Linux Mint, missing packages on Debian and Arch, system instability after updating without a reboot on many distros (NixOS, Fedora, Alma, …). But I’ve had two major issues that caused me to abandon a distro:

1. On Fedora KDE, I felt that my system was overall not as stable as other distros. Then they decided to ship (as a rolling update to a “stable” version) an experimental KDE patch that broke the lock screen for a week. The breakage itself was not so bad, but shipping a patch before upstream merged it to their nightly builds irked me quite a bit.

2. On NixOS, I was not able to get development stuff to work (I’m probably just too dumb for Nix/NixOS). First, I tried to set up a dev workflow that has quite a few external constraints (glibc version, Python version, running on other distros, …). I failed on multiple fronts and gave up on this. Then I tried to build my own KDE/Kirigami app on NixOS and also struggled a lot with it. I struggled for quite a while but gave up on it in the end. I moved to CachyOS afterwards and it worked flawlessly 🤷

I would go a bit further than that. To me, not keeping archival backups for at least a few months seems grossly negligent. To a degree where they should be legally liable for the damages. They probably have some waivers for that in their terms… but they may not hold depending on the jurisdiction.

Fair enough, but I wouldn’t call it abandoned just yet. Long-term support on Linux is clearly a big advantage of AMD/Intel open source drivers :)

It’s still supported by the 580 driver for a few years. But yes, after that it will be in a rough spot.

English pronunciation is much worse than just silent letters. It doesn’t really make any sense and you need to learn tons of words by heart: https://fishofgold.net/2023/12/08/english-pronunciation-is-stupid/

Sometimes even the exact same set of letters are pronounced differently. The verb live vs a live broadcast. Read (present) vs read (past) and many more…. Are you kidding me?

To be fair, $600 for 64GB of RAM is a steal in this economy (you could probably sell the RAM alone for $800). So if you want that much RAM and are ok with the rest of the system - go for it. I mostly wanted to point out why I personally would not like such a machine (why I’m “sleeping” on it).

Mine was the equivalent of $660 at the time with 32GB of RAM (excl. HDDs). In this RAMpocalypse it would probably cost around $1k.

I am interested in trying out an Arm/RISC-V PC for a Linux server. However, what stops me from buying almost all of them is that they require you to use a dubious, poorly-maintained manufacturer fork of some Linux distro.I don’t want my hardware to become e-waste when the manufacturer looses interest in 10 months, so running an upstream distro (like Fedora/Debian/NixOS) is a hard requirement for me. It seems that they half-solved that issue for this machine, so that’s actually good progress.

For this particular machine, Jeff Geerling also reported that the idle power draw is 17W. That’s higher than my faster, fully-upgradable mATX AM5 x86 NAS…

Ok, thanks! Thaf sounds quite advanced, but I’ll have a read afterwards :)

I run it using LM Studio, which defaults to Q4 quantization, I think. I was able to put about 10 layers on the GPU with 64k token context. That put me at about 9.1 GB VRAM usage, leaving some room for Video playback xD

What version do you use and how do you run Qwen3.6? I’ve played around a bit with the Q4 version in LM studio +Zed, but I was not happy with the results. It looses track very often and often enters infinite loops or just stops…

I can run both the 27B and 35B version of Qwen3.6 on my 10GB VRAM 3080, and they run ok. You don’t need to put the entire model in VRAM, even if it’s probably beneficial.

Induction stoves can typically deliver more power into the the item you’re trying to cook.

Technology Connections tested a small, mobile 1.8kW induction plate against a 5kW gas burner: https://youtu.be/_yMMTVVJI4c Guess which is faster.

And I thought my 17 years were long xD

Factorio Express Delivery was quite an effort and a lot of fun.

I also have some fun Europa Universalis 4 achievements that were at 0.1% when I got them, but it seems that I need to up my game there :P

This sounds like a rather weird issue. I agree with your take that grub is not the problem. It seems that there is some issue with the kernel, or the initramfs systemd… Downgrading the kernel didn’t resolve it, so maybe it is a corrupted disk after all? Some suggestions:

1. Run fsck on the partition from a live USB if you haven’t already
2. Enable more verbose logs from the kernel and the initramfs systemd. The LLM suggests removing quiet splash and adding rd.debug systemd.log_level=debug systemd.log_target=console ignore_loglevel (best check the actual parameters yourself).
3. If possible for you: Copy the install to another drive, change the UUIDs, and try again with that.

Debian also supports “unattended-upgrades”: https://wiki.debian.org/PeriodicUpdates

I actually have it set up the same way on both: Automatically install updates (and restart some services), but don’t reboot. I don’t think it was different/easier on Ubuntu.

Overall, the two distros are very similar for a server application. If you’re already running Debian on your PC, I would also go with that for a server.