The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Another Char Clone]

Nvidia has cornered the AI space because all the libraries use CUDA. Don't get me wrong, I use Nvidia on Linux too, but they really need to get their shit together.
I still have to boot with ibt=off because some binary blob from NVIDIA still doesn't have control flow enforcement enabled, they claim their internal compiler was based on an ancient version of GCC that doesn't support it. No, using the "open" drivers won't do it, since they don't even support power management at this time.

 

[Susanna]

For what reason?

For the simple reason that Nvidia’s drivers are an external blob that doesn’t load into the kernel properly. AMD and Intel have their external blobs in the firmware instead, which lets the kernel see the GPU as entirely supported. Nvidia’s driver may be able to game in X, undesirable as that is (latency, tearing), but it won’t even open a spreadsheet under Wayland because the driver is not actually part of the kernel.

Your display output, for stability and ease of use, is better off being something that uses i915 or amdgpu. If you have an iGPU on your processor you can plug the monitor into that and use the GPU for rendering 3D exclusively, with DRI_PRIME=pcie address of GPU.

It’s my experience that trying to do basic computer things like browse the web is very difficult to do with Nvidia but works automatically with AMD and Intel. You’ll be very much a second class citizen for anything but neural networks. You can get it to run, I have, but it’s a huge hassle that AMD and Intel chads don’t have to deal with, so if you have the option to use anything but Nvidia, you should take it. For machine learning, obviously you don’t really have much of a choice. ROCm is unsupported even by AMD for most of their consumer GPUs, and Intel too fresh in the market.

 

[TerribleUser09]

Gaming laptops are the silliest computers ever produced. Not only can't you game on them (short of shooters on ultra low quality, but I don't like shooters and can't stand ultra low quality), they're worthless as laptops because they get all of three seconds of battery life. Useless.

Utterly wrong you are.

I have i7 13500HX with nVidia GPU 4050 w\ 16 GB of VRAM and 16 GB of RAM and you are telling me I can only run "shooters on ultra low quality"? Nice bait. Currently, I haven't found a game that wouldn't run on this machine.

I'll take my old 2013 Macbook Air over a gaming laptop any time. That thing still gets a whole work day worth of battery life, and if I feel like it I can even load up Civ V on it and wait tens of minutes for turns to compute.

I can literally play ANY game that is for Windows on my laptop. I buy a mobile powerhouse to play anywhere and do tasks that your Macbook can't do as efficiently as a gaming laptop.

I won't address to rest of your post because it is hugely personal and subjective which OS is better at performing tasks.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

For the simple reason that Nvidia’s drivers are an external blob that doesn’t load into the kernel properly. AMD and Intel have their external blobs in the firmware instead, which lets the kernel see the GPU as entirely supported. Nvidia’s driver may be able to game in X, undesirable as that is (latency, tearing), but it won’t even open a spreadsheet under Wayland because the driver is not actually part of the kernel.

Your display output, for stability and ease of use, is better off being something that uses i915 or amdgpu. If you have an iGPU on your processor you can plug the monitor into that and use the GPU for rendering 3D exclusively, with DRI_PRIME=pcie address of GPU.

If one is seeking to game in Linux, I don't think using Wayland is going to be preferred over X11, where basically all the Steam proton stuff is used and has the most support. I've been using my 2070 for a few years now and I've had no issues with latency or tearing while gaming or regular use. Only issue I've had is during the Nvidia driver updates where the screen will go black and not recover, requiring a reboot. After that things are back to normal. It's not really a severely compromised piece of hardware you make it out to be.

 

[Susanna]

It's not really a severely compromised piece of hardware you make it out to be.

I had severe problems getting my 3080s to work, to the point that I got a 6900XT to replace them, which just worked out of the box. YMMV.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

For what reason?

For years I've always deliberately gone with nvidia on linux, at least as early as 2005 up until... idk when the last time I built a computer, a few years ago, I think.

I care about open source in the general sense, but I've never gotten the obsession some people have with extremely low level components like the bios absolutely needing to be open source. I understand that it furthers knowledge and porting of this software to new situations and platforms, and I support that, but unless you're like rms tier passionate, everyone compromises once in awhile. I generally try to support open source, but once in awhile if the motivations are aligned right, I'll go for a closed source component occasionally.

In my experience, closed source nvidia drivers for linux always had much higher performance and always were dead simple to just drop in. The open source intel drivers never had complete support for all the features of the card and were fiddly and a pain in the ass to get working sometimes.

From what I've read, NVidia is painful if you
a) Have a laptop
b) Have multiple monitors
c) Use Wayland

I've never had problems either but my setup is literally just pc + keyboard + mouse + monitor.

 

[Betonhaus]

If you're operating a headless server and only use the GPU for rendering and video decoding, is AMD or Nvidia preferred?

Come to think of it, wouldn't those mining gpus that had no video ports that everyone hated work? they got poor resell value so they'd be cheap. If your computer doen't have mobo graphics, is it possible to install linux server without having a different gpu plugged in?

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

It’s my experience that trying to do basic computer things like browse the web is very difficult to do with Nvidia but works automatically with AMD and Intel. You’ll be very much a second class citizen for anything but neural networks.

Or you could just use X, as God intended.

 

[Day of the Cope]

Same here. KDE on X.org with Nvidia drivers, absolutely rock-solid.

Nvidia's also supposed to be a lot better if you want to fiddle around with AI shit.

Based KDE user. Ever have issues with Energy Screen Saving not working properly or is it a "me" issue?

Also, the only thing Nvidia has going for gaming is DLSS which is slowly turning into a crutch for developers who can't optimise their games.

 

[8mm Cunningham]

If you're operating a headless server and only use the GPU for rendering and video decoding, is AMD or Nvidia preferred?

Come to think of it, wouldn't those mining gpus that had no video ports that everyone hated work? they got poor resell value so they'd be cheap. If your computer doen't have mobo graphics, is it possible to install linux server without having a different gpu plugged in?

I use the NVenc codec on Handbrake and DaVinci Resolve, and it's only on Nvidia. So that would be my guess. I would research how to do the encoding and see what hardware would be easiest to set up.

 

[Tetragrammaton]

so ages ago i had an old laptop which ended up being unable to boot windows so i used something called puppy linux to get all my files off of said laptop.

all that aside i was wondering if there are other newer versions of puppy linux or something similar that might be a good idea to have given how windows is going down hill with all these added features that have no real reason to exist other than to steal your info or slow your computer down.

 

[seri0us]

so ages ago i had an old laptop which ended up being unable to boot windows so i used something called puppy linux to get all my files off of said laptop.

all that aside i was wondering if there are other newer versions of puppy linux or something similar that might be a good idea to have given how windows is going down hill with all these added features that have no real reason to exist other than to steal your info or slow your computer down.

Linux Mint

 

[Betonhaus]

Linux Mint

No. Puppy Linux was well known for its file size.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

If you're operating a headless server and only use the GPU for rendering and video decoding, is AMD or Nvidia preferred?

Come to think of it, wouldn't those mining gpus that had no video ports that everyone hated work? they got poor resell value so they'd be cheap. If your computer doen't have mobo graphics, is it possible to install linux server without having a different gpu plugged in?

I'm using a RX550 on a Fedora server for video processing. For this case I wanted less headaches and max stability so I chucked in a tried and tested AMD card. RX550 are also stupid cheap. I think I picked mine up for $40 USD for a 2gb version.

 

[Betonhaus]

Weird question:
If my server is running multiple webservers, each with their own port number, how would I set it up so they're accessible through the same port, just with different root folders?
So for example:
Jellyfinn is accessible by susanmeyers.local:8096
qBittorrent is accessible by susanmeyers.local:8080
Sonarr is accessible by susanmeyers.local:8989
Could i set them up so they're accessible by susanmeyers.local/jellyfinn, susanmeyers.local/qBittorrent, and susanmeyers.local/sonarr?

So far i just have an index page with a list of links

 

[Spasticus Autisticus]

Weird question:
If my server is running multiple webservers, each with their own port number, how would I set it up so they're accessible through the same port, just with different root folders?
So for example:
Jellyfinn is accessible by susanmeyers.local:8096
qBittorrent is accessible by susanmeyers.local:8080
Sonarr is accessible by susanmeyers.local:8989
Could i set them up so they're accessible by susanmeyers.local/jellyfinn, susanmeyers.local/qBittorrent, and susanmeyers.local/sonarr?

So far i just have an index page with a list of links

That's exactly what a reverse proxy is for. nginx has been the standard for that, but these days I prefer Caddy since it has a much nicer config file format and built-in SSL cert auto-renewal with Let's Encrypt or ZeroSSL.

 

[Betonhaus]

That's exactly what a reverse proxy is for. nginx has been the standard for that, but these days I prefer Caddy since it has a much nicer config file format and built-in SSL cert auto-renewal with Let's Encrypt or ZeroSSL.

doy, apache can do it too, i should've checked. I didn't know the keywords to search though.

...i don't need apache though if i can use something more lightweight, don't i?

If I ever plan to put this server on the internet I have to do a full reinstall as I was not prepared for application users and permissions to be so complicated, and it's safer to do a clean install to set it up properly

 

[Lord Xenu]

@Betonhaus
Ive been using a software package called "swizzin" for a few years now. Its designed by someone who sells seedbox type services to end-users. Its been fairly easy to use with minimal configuration. Its sets up nginx as reverse proxy and then when use its package management script to add software like jellyfin or whatever its already configured to use domain.local/rtorrent etc. The scripts make it easy to add new users and manage disk quotas etc.
I was in a hurry to get my box up and running a few years ago and I came across it. Since its worked well, I havent had to change much and the box has been running with only an occasional reboot for a few years now. If youre just using it for media server, and want a convenient solution its worth looking at.

 

[Susanna]

Weird question:
If my server is running multiple webservers, each with their own port number, how would I set it up so they're accessible through the same port, just with different root folders?
So for example:
Jellyfinn is accessible by susanmeyers.local:8096
qBittorrent is accessible by susanmeyers.local:8080
Sonarr is accessible by susanmeyers.local:8989
Could i set them up so they're accessible by susanmeyers.local/jellyfinn, susanmeyers.local/qBittorrent, and susanmeyers.local/sonarr?

So far i just have an index page with a list of links

For the record, the next time you don’t know what something is called, check with chatGPT! Here’s what it told me when I pasted your post into it:

Yes, you can achieve this using a reverse proxy server like Nginx or Apache. You would configure the reverse proxy to listen on the main port (e.g., 80 or 443 for HTTP/HTTPS) and then route incoming requests based on the URL path to the appropriate internal port where each service is running.

For instance, using Nginx, your configuration might look something like this:

```nginx
server {
listen 80;
server_name susanmeyers.local;

location /jellyfin {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8096;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
}

location /qBittorrent {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
}

location /sonarr {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8989;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
}

location / {
# Your index page configuration
}
}
```

This way, when you access `susanmeyers.local/jellyfin`, Nginx will proxy the request to the Jellyfin server running on port 8096. Similarly, requests to `/qBittorrent` and `/sonarr` will be routed to the respective services running on their designated ports.

Keep in mind that you'll need to have Nginx (or Apache) installed and properly configured to act as a reverse proxy. Additionally, make sure that the services you're proxying are configured to work properly with the base URL paths.

 

[Betonhaus]

@Betonhaus
Ive been using a software package called "swizzin" for a few years now. Its designed by someone who sells seedbox type services to end-users. Its been fairly easy to use with minimal configuration. Its sets up nginx as reverse proxy and then when use its package management script to add software like jellyfin or whatever its already configured to use domain.local/rtorrent etc. The scripts make it easy to add new users and manage disk quotas etc.
I was in a hurry to get my box up and running a few years ago and I came across it. Since its worked well, I havent had to change much and the box has been running with only an occasional reboot for a few years now. If youre just using it for media server, and want a convenient solution its worth looking at.

This... Is exactly what I've been looking for from the start.