but the discussion is usually not made in good faith

“Everybody who disagrees with me is a troll or a shill.”

Sure, buddy, because Free Software projects run by volunteers famously have huge guerilla marketing budgets. Won’t somebody think of the poor for-profit companies who first got their leg up by taking Free Software code they didn’t write and then subsequently gradually closed and enshittified it? They’re the real victims here.

I know they try to remain faithful to the original design, but I can’t help but wonder how hard it would be for the OpenMW devs

I would love it if, after OpenMW hits 1.0, they set a new goal of feature parity with Skyrim (or Skywind).

*Get rid of Raspbian and install Raspberry Pi OS

In case you didn’t know, they’re the same thing: “Raspberry Pi OS” is just the newer name for it.

That said, the official instructions for upgrading to a new major version say to re-image your microSD anyway. So never mind; carry on!

Yeah, it’s another layer, and so there definitely is an https://xkcd.com/927/ aspect to it… but (at least in theory) only having problems getting Docker (1 program) to run is better than having problems getting N problems to run, right?

(I’m pretty ambivalent about Docker myself, BTW.)

I’m aware of that, but OP requested “explain like I’m stupid” so I omitted that detail.

A program isn’t just a program: in order to work properly, the context in which it runs — system libraries, configuration files, other programs it might need to help it such as databases or web servers, etc. — needs to be correct. Getting that stuff figured out well enough that end users can easily get it working on random different Linux distributions with arbitrary other software installed is hard, so developers eventually resorted to getting it working on their one (virtual) machine and then just (virtually) shipping that whole machine.

in a WebKit browser

Yeah, but ewww.

Thanks, that’s what I was thinking of but I couldn’t remember details or what it was called.

my knowledge of technical stuff is bretty basic so please be patient with me.

First of all, just from the fact that you’re posting here and asking that kind of question, your knowledge of technical stuff is at least a little bit beyond “pretty basic.”

Second, I get the impression that confusion over exactly what you’re asking for is maybe more due to English not being your first language…? (No judgement if that’s the case; your English is certainly way better than I could do in a second language.)

Anyway, on to actually giving my answer to your question:

• Trying to set up a multiseat system can be tricky in general. If I recall, Other Linus (the one from Linus Tech Tips) has released several videos about that sort of thing over the years, but I don’t think any of the tries were successful enough for him to daily-drive long-term. I know LTT is controversial, but it might be worth taking a look at his experience.

• Trying to do it with GPU passthrough for gaming and 3D modeling adds an additional layer of complexity. I’m a software engineer and have been using Linux exclusively at home for almost a decade (and off and on for many years before that), and even I don’t have GPU passthrough working on my home server. That’s not necessarily to say that it’s super difficult – I haven’t tried very hard to figure it out – just that it isn’t trivial even for somebody with experience.

• If the above has scared you off from the whole “multiseat home server” thing but you still want a home Linux PC for gaming, my distro recommendation would be either bazzite, which I haven’t used, but have heard good things about its appropriateness for that use-case, or boring ol’ Ubuntu (or variant like Kubuntu, depending on your UI preference), which is popular enough to have official support from corporations like Valve and AMD and thus is most likely to “just work.”

• If the above didn’t scare you off from building a home server, I recommend running Proxmox on it.

• As for Nvidia, I fucking hate Nvidia for its CUDA monopoly and would never recommend it out of principle, but I have to grudgingly admit that some stuff just flat-out won’t run on AMD or Intel GPUs. I believe proprietary “niche 3D software” is one of the most likely things to fall into that category, so you may have literally no choice. Check the system requirements of the particular software you plan to use.

• The other features that you might lose out on by not using Nvidia are raytracing and hardware-accelerated PhysX. The AMD 9070 XT allegedly has decent raytracing, but although I own one I haven’t verified that yet because I don’t own any raytraced games. I tried the Half-Life 2 RTX demo, but it failed to start at all. As for PhysX, there are two important things to know: first, that should be improving because Nvidia is working on open-sourcing it. Second, for older games using the older PhysX API, the new 50-series Nvidia cards don’t support them either. Apparently, if you want a decade+ old game like Mirror’s Edge to work properly on your 5090, you’ve got to also have some cheap older Nvidia card alongside it to offload the PhysX calculations to, LOL.

• Speaking of multiple cards, if you want to build a server that supports multiple GPU-accelerated users at the same time, you might consider getting multiple cheaper GPUs instead of one 5090. Although I believe virtually slicing a single GPU for passthrough access by multiple VMs at once may be possible in theory, the phrase “may be possible in theory” should be setting off alarm bells in your mind that it ain’t gonna be easy.

Let me know if you get your Pinephone working well enough to daily-drive, 'cause I’ve got one sitting around collecting dust.

Can I hook a Wii Balance Board to it to track my weight?

Fuck it; let’s just improve OpenMW ourselves.

My plan is to use the $20 Onn (Walmart store-brand) Android TV box LTT recommended as being eminently jailbreakable about a year ago, but I haven’t actually gotten around to hooking it up yet so I can’t authoritatively endorse it.

There is no AMD reference design for the 9070 or 9070 XT.

Relevant to !selfhosted because one of the projects getting funding cut is Let’s Encrypt.

Which brand/model card do you have? There’s no “reference design,” so it matters.

🤡

I upgraded my PC over the last few months (more than I intended; the only original part left is the motherboard) mostly because of this.

I also built it SFF (small form factor) so that I can more easily transport it if I feel the need to leave the US.

There’s a way to do that: it’s called “build your mod on top of a FOSS game instead of proprietary shit.”

The thing that annoys me about game modders is that they never seem to learn the lesson that they should just build on top of a FOSS game instead.