I believe current understanding is that quantum shenanigans mean you can’t truly make a perfect quantum duplicate of something without destroying the original at the same time, so what you’re describing (destroying the original after making the copy) would only be possible for imperfect duplication - e.g. manufacturing a clone and syncing its memory with the original.
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.
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.
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.
Not them, but I do! https://youtu.be/s1fxZ-VWs2U
That kid’s going places!
Try KittyToy (itch.io).
I don’t listen to many podcasts, but those two are pretty great.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/orinoco-tribune-bias-and-credibility/
Overall, we rate Orinoco Tribune as extreme left biased and questionable due to its consistent promotion of anti-imperialist, socialist, and Chavista viewpoints. We rate them low factually due to their strong ideological stance, selective sourcing, the promotion of propaganda, and conspiracy theories related to the West.
The Orinoco Tribune has a clear left-leaning bias. It consistently supports anti-imperialist and Chavista perspectives (those who supported Hugo Chavez). The publication critiques U.S. policies and mainstream media narratives about countries opposing U.S. influence. Articles frequently defend the Venezuelan government and criticize opposition movements and foreign intervention.
Articles and headlines often contain emotionally charged language opposed to the so-called far-right of Venezuela, like this Far Right Plots to Sabotage Venezuela’s Electrical System in Attempt to Disrupt the Electoral Process. The story is translated from another source and lacks hyperlinked sourcing to support its claims.
Maybe don’t consider a pro-Maduro propaganda rag as a legitimate source for a conflict he’s directly involved in.
Maduro is a man who ordered his country to block Signal, ordered it to block social media, and arrests, imprisons, and bans his political opposition. He has also expressed strong support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile the citizens of his country have been starving for years under what is literally known as The Maduro Diet, and the middle class has vanished. He has long forfeit his right to the benefit of the doubt. He is a despot who has now repeatedly falsified election results after mismanaging the country for years, and calls his opposition fascists while being fascist. That the people overwhelmingly want him gone is not some hegemonic plot by the evil West, it’s the natural consequence of his actions.
Unfortunately I can’t even test Llama 3.1 in Alpaca because it refuses to download, showing some error message with the important bits cut off.
That said, the Alpaca download interface seems much more robust, allowing me to select a model and then select any version of it for download, not just apparently picking whatever version it thinks I should use. That’s an improvement for sure. On GPT4All I basically have to download the model manually if I want one that’s not the default, and when I do that there’s a decent chance it doesn’t run on GPU.
However, GPT4All allows me to plainly see how I can edit the system prompt and many other parameters the model is run with, and even configure multiple sets of parameters for the same model. That allows me to effectively pre-configure a model in much more creative ways, such as programming it to be a specific character with a specific background and mindset. I can get the Mistral model from earlier to act like anything from a very curt and emotionally neutral virtual intelligence named Jarvis to a grumpy fantasy monster whose behavior is transcribed by a narrator. GPT4All can even present an API endpoint to localhost for other programs to use.
Alpaca seems to have some degree of model customization, but I can’t tell how well it compares, probably because I’m not familiar with using ollama and I don’t feel like tinkering with it since it doesn’t want to use my GPU. The one thing I can see that’s better in it is the use of multiple models at the same time; right now GPT4All will unload one model before it loads another.
I have a fairly substantial 16gb AMD GPU, and when I load in Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k (Q4_0), it gives me about 12 tokens per second. That’s reasonably fast enough for me, but only 50% faster than CPU (which I test by loading mlabonne’s abliterated Q4_K_M version, which runs on CPU in GPT4All, though I have no idea if that’s actually meant to be comparable in performance).
Then I load in Nous Hermes 2 Mistral 7B DPO (also Q4_0) and it blazes through at 50+ tokens per second. So I don’t really know what’s going on there. Seems like performance varies a lot from model to model, but I don’t know enough to speculate why. I can’t even try Gemma2 models, GPT4All just crashes with them. I should probably test Alpaca to see if these perform any different there…
I actually found GPT4ALL through looking into Kompute (Vulkan Compute), and it led me to question why anyone would bother with ROCm or OpenCL at all.
Rather than replace, I’d guess it could be an alternative. The best part of it will be the ability to natively disable the top tab bar instead of needing a janky userchrome css hack that doesn’t even fully work.
PCIe gen 5 is for the PCIe slots and NVMe storage slots, but they’re backwards compatible; you can put a gen 3 component in a gen 5 slot and it will work at gen 3 speeds. Similarly, if you put a gen 5 component in a gen 4 slot, it will be limited to gen 4 speeds. Right now there’s very little appreciable difference between gen 4 and gen 5 unless you’re spending a lot of money on the component (GPU/storage). Another thing to note is that Gen 5 requires that both the CPU and motherboard support it; a CPU with gen 4 support in a gen 5 motherboard will limit all the slots to gen 4 speeds.
RAM is a totally different standard that must be matched exactly for what the motherboard has; if it’s a DDR5 motherboard then you have to use DDR5 RAM or it won’t even fit in the slots. You can get a PCIe gen 5 motherboard and just use gen 4 SSDs or GPUs, that’s perfectly fine and leaves you room to upgrade later.
Seems mostly fine to me, I game all the time on Linux (Bazzite gang 🤘) with a 3900X + 7900GRE, haven’t had any significant issues aside from needing to make sure clock speeds were configured correctly on the GPU. Two ram sticks is the way to go with these systems as sometimes they don’t support 4 sticks at full speed.
You’re right that GPU passthrough is definitely more for tinkering or advanced users with very specific needs (usually professionals who need Windows/Nvidia and choose to run it in a VM rather than dual-boot), with a budget to match. For a gamer couple, having fully separate systems is going to be much less hassle and more resilient against failure.
The one thing I would recommend changing is the power supply, it’s unironically the most important component in the computer because if it fails it can kill everything else, and the System Power 10 is known enough for being low-quality that discussions of that come up in web searches. Poor quality power supplies can damage your hardware and otherwise cause weird, intermittent issues even if everything seems to work fine most of the time, and will fail and shut off the computer when a good power supply would have just kept on chugging. Seasonic and Corsair are considered the best brands and have 10 year warranties - they’re more expensive, but they’re worth it. You want 80+ Gold or better these days, this is a buy once, cry once component.
If you don’t have a UPS, I would also recommend getting one at some point, either one big shared unit (if they’ll be close together) or two individual units. Having backup power will allow you to shut down the computers gracefully during a power outage, and prevents the worst-case scenario where the power goes out while the computer is installing updates and it turns into a brick.
Well, not free per se, DVDs and Blurays and the computer in my closet I use to host Jellyfin for the rest of the home do cost money… But they sure as hell can’t jack up the price after the fact. Quite the contrary; the hardware needed for it is getting cheaper over time. I can also use it even when the internet is down.
This is an entire category of proteins known as Crystallins. Crystallins of one kind or another seem to be used when pretty much any living species needs to grow a lens. They aren’t exclusive to lenses, either; many crystallins are found elsewhere in an organism’s metabolic pathways, such as the nervous system.
I found this paper from 1996 titled “Lens Crystallins of Invertebrates” which I’d say is exactly what you’re looking for. There wasn’t much for arthropods, but it mentions Drosocrystallin for the Drosophila fruit fly’s corneal lens, and antigen 3G6 as “present in the ommatidial crystallin cone and central nervous system of numerous arthropods”.