I don’t want to leap into your throat, but have you tried a clean install of a different distro on a USB? And I mean clean; no reusing your home partition, no weird configs until you test out-of-the-box settings.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that I have tons of cruft, workarounds, and configurations in my system that, to be blunt, screw up Nvidia + Wayland. And my install isn’t even that old.

Hunting them all down would take so long that I mind as well clean install CachyOS.

I haven’t bitten the bullet yet (as I just run Linux off my AMD IGP, which frees up CUDA VRAM anyway), but it’s feeling more urgent by the day.

Does the BIOS support any overclocking/tweaking?

I’m not familliar with Rocket Lake (your CPU generation), but you may be able to bump the voltage or loosen the timings a bit to get it stable. Even without BIOS support, it’s possible you could do this from your operating system, like you can with Ryzen.

The real issue is devs not wanting to pay for hosting server side anticheat. I

Or allowing self hosted servers. With actual mods that just ban people who are being jerks, and basic anticheat tools shipped to them.

Whatever the issue and solution, the current state of the gaming market still makes mass linux gaming kind of impossible. Not from the anticheat games specifically as much as the OEM problem.

Gaming is the best commercial inroad I’ve seen, and exploding.

But I think the “kernel anticheat” thing is going to be a hard wall until Valve works it out. Unfortunately, big OEMs don’t want to ship a “gaming PC” that can’t run Fortnite.

Reddit’s UX is awful though, at least on the website. But I guess most people use the phone apps?

Mmmmm. Pure “prompt engineering” feels soulless to me. And you have zero control over the endpoint, so changes on their end can break your prompt at any time.

Messing with logprobs and raw completion syntax was fun, but the US proprietary models took that away. Even sampling is kind of restricted now, and primitive compared to what’s been developed in open source.

If you think of LLMs as an extra teammate, there’s no fun in managing them either. Nurturing the personal growth of an LLM is an obvious waste of time. Micromanaging them, watching to preempt slop and derailment, is frustrating and rage-inducing.

Finetuning LLMs for niche tasks is fun. It’s explorative, creative, cumulitive, and scratches a ‘must optimize’ part of my brain. It feels like you’re actually building and personalizing something, and teaches you how they work and where they fail, like making any good program or tool. It feels you’re part of a niche ‘old internet’ hacking community, not in the maw of Big Tech.

Using proprietary LLMs over APIs is indeed soul crushing. IMO this is why devs who have to use LLMs should strive to run finetunable, open weights models where they work, even if they aren’t as good as Claude Code.

But I think most don’t know they exist. Or had a terrible experience with terrible ollama defaults, hence assume that must be what the open model ecosystem is like.

Most of my observation of this was in Tanzania, and Kenya seems similar, but I don’t really know what living there is like so I’d rather not outright recommend them.

But their evironmentalism is as serious as I’ve seen anywhere, and the people are super nice.

A lot of Africa is majorly into wildlife protection, free education, environmental sustainability, friendly communal culture, stuff like that. It’s developing like crazy.

I hear some of South America is too.

But uh, employment, crime? YMMV. Depends on how you intend to make a living I guess.

Ah.

Well one catch I’ve found outside of CachyOS is that if something isn’t working right, it’s easy to create a ton of work for yourself trying to fix it. An example would be fighting your system trying to roll a package forward for a fix, which then gets out of sync with your distro, which requires more manual fixing since you’re the one maintaining it now…

The Arch/Cachy ecosystem, on the other hand, tends to encourage more usage of system packages, and fixes stuff quick. Usually waiting a day or a few days + a pacman -Syyuu fixes what was wrong.

If your Dad is a software engineer, it’s possible he might fall into that trap with Bazzite. It kinda just depends on his habits/personality, though from what you describe this may not be a huge danger.

AFAIK CachyOS still demands a little involvement in the OS. Like, you have to watch the logs when you update, you need keep context in mind, like knowing you’re running KDE and an Nvidia card and so on. But I feel like Bazzite would be more usable to someone who doesn’t know (and doesn’t need to know) what a filesystem or a discrete GPU are.

But in terms of stability, CachyOS has been rock solid for me. The cadence that Arch + CachyOS devs fix stuff has been utterly perfect.

So I say if your dad is more ‘software curious,’ give him CachyOS. If he doesn’t like messing with computer stuff, give him Bazzite.

CUDA is actually pretty cool, especially in the early days when there was nothing like it. And Intel/AMD attempts at alternatives have been as mixed as their corporate dysfunction.

And Nvidia has long has a focus on other spaces, like VR, AR, dataset generation, robotics, “virtual worlds” and such. If every single LLM thing disappeared overnight in a puff of smoke, they’d be fine; a lot of their efforts would transition to other spaces.

Not that I’m an apologist for them being total jerks, but I don’t want to act like CUDA isn’t useful, either.

Yeah I mean you are preaching to the choir there. I picked up a used 3090 because rocm on the 7900 was in such a poor state.

That being said, much of what you describe is just software obstinacy. AMD (for example) has had hardware encoding since early 2012, with the 7970. Intel quicksync has long been a standard on laptops. It’s just a few stupid propriety bits that never bothered to support it.

CUDA is indeed extremely entrenched in some areas, like anything involving PyTorch or Blender’s engines. But there’s no reason (say) Plex shouldn’t support AMD, or older editing programs that use OpenGL anyway.

Well, same for me TBH. I’d buy a huge Battlemage card before you could blink, but the current cards aren’t really faster than an ancient 3090.

But most people I see online want something more affordable, right in the 9000 series or Arc range, not a 384-bit GPU.

Fact is, Nvidia has the vast majority of market share: https://www.techpowerup.com/337775/nvidia-grabs-market-share-amd-loses-ground-and-intel-disappears-in-latest-dgpu-update

It’s inexplicable to me. Why are folks ignoring Battlemage and AMD 9000 series when they’re so good?

Alas, for whatever reason they aren’t even picking existing alternatives to Nvidia, so Nvidia suddenly becoming unavailable would be a huge event.

AFAIK, the H100 and up (Nvidia’s bestselling data center GPUs) can technically game, but they’re missing so many ROPs that they’re really bad at it. There will be no repurposing all those AI datacenters for cloud gaming farms.

On desktop Linux, between Helium (relatively new and lightweight, comes with full UBO), Cromite (more hardcore antifingerprinting), and Firefox, I’m quite satisfied.

Another is to use ublacklist (if you aren’t already using ublock origin for some inexplicable reason) and add in AI/SEO slop blacklists. They will be filtered out of search.

Oh, and use the wiki redirect extension.

It doesn’t fix everything, but it’s a massive improvement for when the information you need is pretty recent.

Also, FYI the Kagi browser is great.

Well, the next question is “what do you do when you drive?” Cars and trucks have wildly different roles they’re good at.

So basically, what do you want your computer to be good at doing? That dictates your hardware purchase and the OS you will end up using.

If you have a desktop/laptop, you run Linux.

If you have a Mac, you run OSX.

Im not sure where you’re going with this OP, unless you’re looking for purchasing advice. It’s kinda like asking if a car or truck tire is better, with the answer being “well, do you have a car or a truck?”