Dran

There are server chips like the E7-8891 v3 which lived in a weird middle ground of supporting both ddr3 and ddr4. On paper, it’s about on par with a ryzen 5 5500 and they’re about $20 on US eBay. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying an aftermarket/used server board to see if it holds up the way it appears to on paper. $20 for a CPU (could even slot 2), $80 for a board, $40 for 32gb of ddr3 in quad chanel. ~$160 for a set of core components doesn’t seem that bad in modern times, especially if you can use quad/oct channel to offset the bandwidth difference between ddr3 and ddr4.

I think finding a cooler and a case would be the hardest part

+1 for Niagra. It takes a few days to get used to but it’s the launcher every power user didn’t know they wanted. Lifetime purchase options and a very responsive/passionate dev

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain

Before the advent of AI, I wrote a slack bot called slackbutt that made Markov chains of random lengths between 2 and 4 out of the chat history of the channel. It was surprisingly coherent. Making an “llm” like that would be trivial.

It definitely can be disabled post-install but is much simpler to install without it at install-time, and has the added benefit of not pulling 2-5gb of other things that won’t be relevant to your use case. It’s not that the disk waste is that big of a deal, but any issues you run into will be that much easier to troubleshoot with fewer moving parts.

That wasn’t quite the takeaway I was going for. You can get a lot done on 8gb of ram. I was just trying to point out that it would probably be your first bottleneck as you started to scale out, and that you should consider using the server headless to make the ram you have go that much further.

All of those would be perfectly cromulent nodes for small containers. The first issue you’ll run into is the low ram. Some homelab projects would cause you to exceed 8gb, but the good news is if you’re using an external backend via NFS, you can always scale out (more nodes) or up(more compute per node,) later with minimal headache.

If you’re going to be memory constrained, don’t waste 1-2gb on a gui, install Ubuntu/Debian/whatever headless

Compsci labs or everywhere?

Not OP but I think this guy is remembering a scene from silicon valley, not from reality. That said it’s probably not that far off. Amazon smart devices absolutely have this “feature” in production today-- and it’s opt-out, not opt-in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Sidewalk

Unattended-upgrade does security-only patching once every 4 hours (in rough sync with my local mirror)

Full upgrades are done weekly, accompanied by a reboot

I find that the split between security patching and feature/bug patching maintains a healthy balance knowing when something is likely to break but never being behind on the latest cve.

Semantics aside, I believe the correct answer is “ribbed for death’s pleasure”

It was recommended to me not as a game, but like an interactive movie. As more art than game. Going into it with those expectations is probably why I loved it so much. I can definitely see how someone might get a very different experience with very different expectations.

Back in the day when our community was switching from xmpp to discord, our solution was to write a bot on either end that relayed messages from one to the other. The xmpp bot got more and more naggy over time until eventually we put the xmpp side in read-only for everyone except the relay bot. It did a good enough job at building momentum to switch that the final holdouts came over when we went r/o.

You might consider building something similar if you want to make a genuine effort to switch to matrix or IRC. A relay bot solves the problem of the first people being punished by virtue of being first.

I use teams for work every day (calls and dm features) via Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with X11/awesomewm/pulse via Firefox and have no issues

That suggests that as long as you’re using a reasonably modern version of Debian with a sane config you should be fine

What if the booby trap had AI though?

(I’m joking please don’t hurt me)

I switched to Niagara a few years back because Nova didn’t have good support for foldables and tbh I haven’t looked back. It’s very different but once you get used to it it’s much faster than a traditional launcher.

I like the long-term overlapping security release that server-first focus gives me. I rely on it even. My daily driver is built from Ubuntu server headless LTS, X11, Awesomewm. My automation really only needs updates every 5 years, and I get the option to update it every 2. The same script I wrote to remove the esm motd message 10 years ago still works. I don’t know what else people want from canonical.

Long-time (and current) Ubuntu daily-driver here. When I first started dabbling 20 years ago, Ubuntu had unparalleled out-of-the-box driver support for things that required third-party drivers. It gave them an era of dominance that had a secondary effect of “if I have a Linux problem and Google it, Ubuntu guides are the most likely to exist” which kept me using it to this day. Is it the best? Probably not, but I have twenty years of automation built around it and it’s comfortable.

The people that still use it today are the functional tinkerers. I don’t generally engage with these threads because I assume that every user making these posts isn’t searching for the answers that are already out there in previous threads. The paths that lead to Ubuntu aren’t the same paths that the “I use arch btw” people take. It’s a case of the kinds of users that choose Ubuntu, don’t go out of their way to interject that they’re Linux people. We’re just regular people that don’t want an adversarial relationship with our operating system.

Snap, esm, Ubuntu pro, they all get out of your way with a simple command or single line in a config file, and they respect the same signaling they’ve used since each product’s inception. I want a product that is both open-source and financially sustainable, because it leads to stability in my life. If windows had easily togglable telemetry and functional automation I would never have switched in the first place.

My wife and I have both been using this setup for over a year and we’ve never looked back

My solution to this problem was to buy a $180 Dell workstation off eBay and install Ubuntu on that as my main workstation. My gaming desktop is now in the basement and runs sunshine. Moonlight over LAN is basically native, and solves the annoying reboot to switch tasks scenario.

If you ran a raw Ubuntu/fedora/whatever, you can use qemu/libvrt to run small virtual machines as required. You start and stop them with virsh, define them with simple xml files, and can easily automate the creation/destruction of them if desired.