Onihikage

Always has been.

I would recommend against pairing Battlemage with a low-spec CPU. As shown by Hardware Canucks, Hardware Unboxed, and others, Intel’s Arc graphics driver overhead is currently much higher than competitors, which means they’re disproportionately affected by having a weaker CPU. This causes the B580 to lose significantly more performance when paired with low-end CPUs than a roughly equivalent Nvidia or AMD card. At the very low end, the difference is especially stark. In some games, the B580 goes from neck-and-neck with a 4060 on a high-end CPU to losing half its performance with a low-end older CPU, while the 4060 only loses about 25%.

If you’re really stuck with a lower-end CPU, it would be far better to get a used midrange AMD or Nvidia GPU from an older product generation for the same price and use that.

I’m late to the party but have you seen Linux Journey? https://linuxjourney.com/

Have you ever seen Linux Journey? It’s a very informative set of tutorials on how Linux fundamentally works under the hood; all the separate systems that together create an operating system. The concepts you learn there will apply to almost any distro in some way, even if some distros (like Atomic ones) don’t let you mess with all of it.

For more top-level transition concerns, given that you’re coming from stock Debian running KDE… Bazzite can also run KDE, so provided you select KDE when you download it, your GUI experience should be pretty much identical. Some minor but important differences would include themes, but there are guides for that, too.

When it comes to package management, the intent on Atomic systems is you basically don’t install traditional packages (Flatpaks are the preferred option), but Bazzite has frameworks in place such that you can install pretty much any package from any distro, as laid out in their documentation I linked in my previous post and just now. Work is also ongoing to make traditional package-based software installations more seamless with an incoming switch from rpm-ostree to bootc, but that’s getting into the weeds. If you have a deb file for a GUI program that’s not available as a Flatpak, you’ll be using a Distrobox to install it.

If you have any specific concerns about the differences, let me know and I can hopefully give you more details.

I can highly recommend Bazzite for your needs. It has a KDE version which is clearly your favorite Desktop Environment (DE), it’s extremely safe/stable due to being an Atomic distro (you can always boot into the previous image if a system update broke something), has incredible documentation, supports almost any traditional app through Distrobox (VPN requires rpm-ostree for now), has a scripted easy install of Waydroid for native android emulation, and has a few tweaks preconfigured to ensure the desktop gaming experience is a little more seamless out of the box than a stock distro. It really seems to tick all the boxes for what you’re looking for.

If you want more focus on development and less on gaming, the Universal Blue team also makes Aurora for more developer-focused workloads, but Steam not being included in the image does introduce some usability regressions - Steam running via Flatpak or Distrobox is just plain less capable than a native install, though work is ongoing to make native installs Just Work even on Atomic systems.

People really out here treating their web browser like it’s a mainframe

My favorite response to that currently is "Okay, send me your email password and show me all your credit cards. Oh, why not? You’ve done nothing wrong, so you have nothing to hide, right?

Audile is on F-droid, though it uses AudD for the actual music recognition backend. I’m not sure it’s possible to have a FOSS backend for this kind of service.

Are we still talking about the OP? The idea that it’s wrong to curse someone out because you disagree with their take is not “politics that inherently goes against FOSS philosophy.” Foss grows faster when more people get involved and contribute. If the most vocal contributors treat everyone they disagree with like shit, they will demoralize their community and make others stop wanting to contribute. That kills projects.

In general, Bazzite being immutable just means the core system isn’t modular to the end user to the degree that Arch is. You of course can use flatpaks or appimages like any distro, and there are still several ways to install traditional rpm/deb/aur programs (the usual Fedora method doesn’t work because dnf doesn’t exist). If it’s just an app that doesn’t require significant integration with the OS, the recommendation is to install them into a distrobox container (where dnf does exist) and then distrobox-export [program] to make them visible to the host system. VPNs need a little more integration so those are installed by layering with rpm-ostree and then enabling the systemd service(s). Layering makes updates take longer to install so it should be avoided when possible.

One of the interesting things about Universal Blue’s images like Bazzite is if you want the benefits of atomic while also having a more custom system than they offer without having to install a bunch of things in rpm-ostree, the process to build a custom image based on one of theirs is apparently quite easy to do and automate, though I haven’t done it myself.

In general, yes. Most of the difficulty is due to being on Linux and running games through the Proton/WINE compatibility layer, so there can be an extra layer of jank involved, but it’s very possible.

If modding consists of dropping files into the game directory, it will work almost exactly the same as in Windows. However, if some of those files replace the game’s DLLs, then whatever WINE runner you use might need to be told to use the DLLs in the game directory instead of its own.

If you need to use a mod manager, that situation is still not ideal - native Linux mod managers I know of are only the Nexus Mods app (very new, there’s some talk of it being integrated directly into the Heroic launcher) and Limo. Everything else, you’ll be running whatever bespoke Windows mod manager your game uses through Proton/WINE, probably with Steam Tinker Launch, possibly Lutris.

tl;dr There can be an extra layer of complexity over modding on Windows, but it’s otherwise comparable.

During boot, you’re presented with 4 snapshots you can choose between so if an update did happen to break something, it’s easy as just choosing an older snapshot after a reboot.

Those are actually just two snapshots, there’s a bug in GRUB that displays them twice. Purely visual, and you can fix it with a ujust script, run in the terminal with ujust configure-grub. There are lots of little scripted tweaks and installations available; you can get most of the list by running ujust by itself. Incredible work by the maintainers.

The dreaded onosecond happens to the best of us.

PCGameBenchmark seems to be exactly what you’re looking for.

You could try FreeFileSync. I use it for pretty much your exact use case, though my music library is much smaller and changes less often, so I haven’t tinkered with its automation. Manual sync works like a dream.

Try clicking the sign in button, then navigating back to the video without actually signing in. Seems to work every time I’ve tried it so far.

You’re entirely correct, but in theory they can give it a pretty good go, it just requires a lot more computation, developer time, and non-LLM data structures than these companies are willing to spend money on. For any single query, they’d have to get dozens if not hundreds of separate responses from additional LLM instances spun up on the side, many of which would be customized for specific subjects, as well as specialty engines such as Wolfram Alpha for anything directly requiring math.

LLMs in such a system would be used only as modules in a handcrafted algorithm, modules which do exactly what they’re good at in a way that is useful. To give an example, if you pass a specific context to an LLM with the right format of instructions, and then ask it a yes-or-no question, even very small and lightweight models often give the same answer a human would. Like this, human-readable text can be converted into binary switches for an algorithmic state machine with thousands of branches of pre-written logic.

Not only would this probably use an even more insane amount of electricity than the current approach of “build a huge LLM and let it handle everything directly”, it would take much longer to generate responses to novel queries.

Yep. In fact, Amazon devices can connect to other Amazon devices over their Sidewalk meshnet and get the wifi password that way. I’m never getting anything from Amazon more complicated than a screwdriver.

Up in the Hardware Information section of hyfetch, on the left.

Webtoon is still shitty in other ways. When they adapt a property, they want it their way, regardless of the author’s original vision. I’ve seen several stories that originated on Royal Road get Webtoon adaptations, and the adaptations always seem to change or leave out important parts of the story, making characters look stupid or just completely replacing entire sets of characters, forcing the story to diverge substantially when inevitably something they got rid of turns out to have been critically important to where the author was taking things. They turn great stories into middling slop every single time.