MalReynolds

ROCm works just fine on consumer cards for inferencing and is competetive or superior in $/Token/s and beats NVIDIA power consumption. ROCm 7.0 seems to be giving >2x uplift on consumer cards over 6.9, so that’s lovely. Haven’t tried 7 myself yet, waiting for the dust to settle, but I have no issues with image gen, text gen, image tagging, video scanning etc using containers and distroboxes on Bazzite with a 7800XT.

Bleeding edge and research tends to be CUDA, but mainstream use cases are getting ported reasonably quickly. TLDR unless you’re training or researching (unlikely on consumer cards) AMD is fine and performant, plus you get stable linux and great gaming.

podlet does a pretty good job of spitting out quadlet .container files or entire pods from a dockerfile.

Attaching files from Dolphin to mail just works as Drag and Drop (gives you the choice of inline or attachment for images, cool, did not know that). Not sure for firefox, would need a target, but there’s always right click, copy location, paste into any file chooser.

As in between them ? Not something I do enough to care about, and I use Zen and Betterbird, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but I just selected something from Zen and dropped it into a new message in Betterbird without issue…KDE FWIW. There are still some rough edges with flatpak and wayland, but they’re mostly smoothed now. It’s usually permissions (KeepassXC and firefox is a bitch for example, but doable).

Yup, you can just do your Arch (or other distro-hopping) stuff in a distrobox if you want. Break it, blow it away and start fresh, uBlue don’t care… Switch DEs, that’s a one liner (although Gnome and KDE still don’t play well together, so use a fresh user). What’s not to love?

Experienced here, did my time in Arch, learned a lot, perhaps even more than necessary, now retired to Fedora, then Bazzite and Aurora-dev. It just gets out of my way nicely. Something, something, Bell curve meme, plateau of enlightenment meme.

And I would absolutely recommend Arch to a technically competent gamer newcomer as the fastest way to get up to speed.

Horses, Courses.

It’s PCIe 4.0 :(

Boo! Silly me thinking DDR5 implied PCIe5, what a shame.

Feels like they’re testing the waters with Halo, hopefully a loud ‘waters great, dive in’ signal gets through and we get something a bit fitter for desktop use, maybe with more memory (and bandwidth) next gen. Still, gotta love the power usage, makes for one hell of a NAS / AI inference server (and inference isn’t that fussy about PCIe bandwidth, hell eGPU works fine as long as the model / expert fits in VRAM.

Pretty sure that’s a x4 PCIe slot (admittedly PCIe 5x4, but not many video cards speak PCIe5), would totally trade a usb4 for a x8, but these laptop chips are pretty constrained lanes wise.