The Centos “eight pointed star”?

Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it’s easier to mouse to it, since you can’t go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing ‘alt’ with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they’re ‘ugly’, and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)

Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It’s not like they’ve been ‘innovating’ that particular feature and annoying their users.

The actual fix is probably ‘enable mixed ASCII / Windows-1252 calls to Windows UTF-16 functions’, when some strings have different codepages to others’, or something silly. But that fix sounds better.

A rising tide lifts all boats - every improvement is welcome

Data centre GPUs tend not to have video outputs, and have power (and active cooling!) requirements in the “several kW” range. You might be able to snag one for work, if you work at a university or at somewhere that does a lot of 3D rendering - I’m thinking someone like Pixar. They are not the most convenient or useful things for a home build.

When the bubble bursts, they will mostly be used for creating a small mountain of e-waste, since the infrastructure to even switch them on costs more than the value they could ever bring.

There’s times when I want to find “exact matches and nothing but” - searching for error messages, for instance - and that’s made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don’t want you to switch off their “helpful” features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.

Mine was my local Forgejo server, NAS server, DHCP -> DNS server for ad blocking on devices connected to the network, torrent server, syncthing server for mobile phone backup, and Arch Linux proxy, since I’ve a couple of machines that basically pull the same updates as each other.

I’ve retired it in favour of a mini PC, so it’s back to being a RetroPie server, have loads of old games available in the spare room for when we have a party, amuses children of all ages.

They’re quite capable machines. If they weren’t so I/O limited, they’d be amazing. They tend to max out at 10 megabyte/second on SD card or over USB / ethernet. If you don’t need a faster disk than that, they’re likely to be ideal in the role.

“Mostly perfectly unless they’ve got anti-cheat, and you’ll be limited to 30 fps for most of the fancy-graphics titles.”

Actually pretty damn good. Considering the difficulty I had getting frames out of E33 on desktop, having it play reasonably on the go is impressive. 60 fps @ 4K made my PC sound like a vacuum cleaner and was warming up the whole house; really needs some of the upscaling trickery to be comfortable to play.

Especially since any version of Git from the last view years has a passionate hatred of symlinks for this reason, which is a bit annoying if you’ve a legit usecase. They’re either very out-of-date, or have done some very foolish customisation…

Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.

True. Was thinking of indie games, of the kind I might develop myself., which would be limited to the languages I speak myself.

If you’re developing something where you’d expect enough international sales to hire a translation team, then Chinese would be a sensible first choice, followed by Spanish.

Closing in on 8% if you filter it by “English language only”. Chinese speakers overwhelmingly (almost exclusively) use Windows and make up about 30% of all Steam users, which skews the rest-of-world results. And I wouldn’t consider 8% of all prospective sales to be a joke, especially since that number only keeps on rising and by the time you’ve spent a few years writing a game it’s likely to be quite a bit more.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

Yeah, indeed. Steam language breakdown is about 40% English, 30% Chinese, 10% Russian, 5% Spanish, 15% other. Chinese speakers overwhelmingly use Windows rather than Linux, so choosing ‘English only’ basically doubles the Linux percentage.

I’d be interested to know why Linux has such bad update in Chinese-speaking regions. (It’s the lingua franca for much of Asia, so not just China, just largely China.) Obviously, inertia plays a part - easier to move to Linux if you know someone else that can help you, which if there’s no-one then you might be a bit stuck. Are the fonts crappy? Are the input methods greatly superior in Windows?

Sorry, putting the two things together, my mistake. My router doesn’t let you specify the DNS server directly, but it does allow you to specify a different DHCP server, which can then hand out new IPs with a different DNS server specified, as you say. Bit of a house of cards. DHCP server in order to be the DNS server too.

The router provided with our internet contract doesn’t allow you to run your own firmware, so we don’t have anything so flexible as what OpenWRT would provide.

Short answer; in order to Pi-hole all of the advertising servers that we’d be connecting to otherwise. Our mobile phones don’t normally allow us to choose a DNS server, but they will use the network-provided one, so it sorts things out for the whole house in one go.

Long, UK answer: because our internet is being messed with by the government at the moment, and I’d prefer to be confident that the DNS look-ups we receive haven’t been altered. That doesn’t fix everything - it’s a VPN job - but little steps.

The DHCP server provided with the router is so very slow in comparison to running our own locally, as well. Websites we use often are cached, but connecting to something new takes several seconds. Nothing as infuriating as slow internet.

Big shout out to Windows 11 and their TPM bullshit.

Was thinking that my wee “Raspberry PI home server” was starting to feel the load a bit too much, and wanted a bit of an upgrade. Local business was throwing out some cute little mini PCs since they couldn’t run Win11. Slap in a spare 16 GB memory module and a much better SSD that I had lying about, and it runs Arch (btw) like an absolute beast. Runs Forgejo, Postgres, DHCP, torrent and file server, active mobile phone backup etc. while sipping 4W of power. Perfect; much better fit than an old desktop keeping the house warm.

Have to think that if you’ve been given a work desktop machine with a ten-year old laptop CPU and 4GB of RAM to run Win10 on, then you’re probably not the most valued person at the company. Ran Ubuntu / GNOME just fine when I checked it at its original specs, tho. Shocking, the amount of e-waste that Microsoft is creating.

The amount of fuel required to launch them into the sun is more than is required to eject the from the solar system completely, it’s not very efficient.

Although putrid, they remain a valuable source of protein and nutrients. As a more carbon-efficient alternative, I suggest tying some waste stone around their feet and chucking them into the sea. Something in the depths will eat them.

Reasonable for a lightly-loaded home server, however. I’ve got Arch Linux ARM (btw) running as my home Forgejo / Transmission / DHCP / NAS, and it just sits and sips power while providing all those services 24/7 like a champ.

Shout out to ALARM for having basically the entire Arch ecosystem (including 99% of AUR) all working and ready-to-go.

Oh, the greybeard stereotype, for sure. Carrying the weight required for the ‘classic RMS’ look isn’t good for your health. Cute twinks in knee-high socks carrying a blahaj are much better, everyone loves them.

Now, the fully-actuated fursuit for if you want to be taken seriously as a sysadmin? That’s an expensive hobby.

especially if you have the infrastructure in place

I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were running ASICs then the power costs just weren’t worth it, and application-specific is part of the acronym, there. Why would these things even be able to run an LLM?

In any case, Bitcoin just needs to iterate as fast as possible in order to find a match, doesn’t really need a lot of RAM. Whereas LLMs need really large amounts - NVIDIA’s latest data centre racks have about a terabyte for a reason. Even if you had cornered the market on GPUs five years ago for Bitcoin, what use are those cards for this?

Yeah. You can sell ‘pure consoles’ at a loss and make it up with games sales. This is basically a mini PC that you could reinstall the OS and use for any purpose. Selling it at a loss would be crazy.