Bluefruit

I feel that man. Right now I load balance between tmobile and starlink cause the towers near me suck. I work from home so having consistent internet is really important and in my area, the fiber build out is really slow and expensive. Luckily I'm moving here soon but its been a pain in the ass to say the least.

Starlink is great for what it is. Very important tech but yea, I'm sure most everyone would be happier with fiber.

I say this as someone who actively pays for starlink out of necessity.

Fuck you, no. Fiber is much better for everyone. Eat shit muskrat.

Wow, Ive never heard that before but that is such a beautiful way of putting it. I love art that's messy and weird. Music that sounds imperfect where you can hear mistakes or "imperfections". Either intentional or not, I love those kinds of things in art. Makes it human.

I don't have many Linux friendly plugins that i can share unfortunately. When I tried running reaper on Linux, most things I tried either didn't run at all or crashed.

Best I had working was decent sampler. And even that didn't work great for me:

https://www.decentsamples.com/product/decent-sampler-plugin/

Really cool project though, and lots of fun instruments to try on pianobook.

Tldr, I recommend sticking with Windows or using two separate machines, one for music production running Windows, the other for running everything else with Linux.

Music production isnt great on Linux in my experience at least right now. If you use any paid plugins that are windows only, there's a good chance they won't run. I haven't used ableton or cakewalk but I use reaper which has a native Linux version, and even that had a lot of issues. Anything with ilok is a no go, even plugins that dont, I had a hard time getting working or if they did work, they crashed A LOT.

Gaming and other general use has been fine for me, ive even done video and photo editing on Linux and been happy with it.

If you want the easiest experience, I typically recommend Fedora KDE spin or kubuntu. KDE is a desktop environment that is very similar to windows and highly customizable. You'd likely feel at home on it. Immutable distro might also be a good option if you really want the "IDC just do the update" path. Harder to break, easier to manage from what ive heard but I haven't used them personally so maybe others that have can chime in.

I made a windows only box for music production and use Linux on my main PC. It runs windows 10 and is rarely connected to the internet except when I need it to be. If you wanna run Linux and make music, it can be done, but I had a terrible time with it and have given up for now.

So make a separate machine for music production and run Linux on your main pc or just run Windows is my advice. So far, this has been the best setup for me. I don't worry about my privacy, I can make music when I want, and I don't have to worry about incompatible plugins, crashes, stupid nonsense that gets in my way when i wanna make music.

Thats rad, thanks for the info. I may follow suit, been trying to degoogle myself lately.

Yea I'm aware but I appreciate the insight :) so far my local ai experience has been lack luster so I'm hoping that training and RAG will make up for the context size at least a little. Ifnit can answer accurately in the first place, it may not need as big of a context window.

If you haven't tried using RAG in some form, I would recommend giving it a go. Its pretty cool stuff, helps make models answer more accurately based on the documentation you give them though in my case, ive had limited success. Tbh, chatgpt has become my last resort when I just wanna get something done but I don't like using it due to the privacy concerns, not to mention the ethical issues I have with ai training in general from big tech.

How is searxng BTW? Would you say its good to host or do you use a normal search engine more often? Or do you just use it for the AI search plugin?

Ive actually been thinking about using it rather than duckduckgo but was also hopeful the search index they are working on would be enough to satisfy my needs, or that a self hosted AI enabled search engine would work well enough when I need it.

MA, THERES A WEIRD CAT OUTSIDE

Thats why i was considering training my own model if possible. Ive been toying around with kobold.CPP and gpt4all which both have RAG implementations.

My idea is to essentially chat with documentation and as a separate use case, have it potentially be a AI search engine but locally hosted. I do still prefer to search myself, but fuck man, searches have gotten so bad, and the kobold.CPP web lookup feature was pretty neat IMO.

So yea you're not wrong, I'm just hoping that if in train it and or give it documentation it can reference when answering, it will be suitable. Mostly AI has been good for me as kind of a rubber ducky when troubleshooting and helping me search for things when I have some specific question and in don't want "top 5 things vaguely related to your question" results.

Getting ready to move from out of the woods and back to civilization with my partner.

Not looking forward to having neighbors above or below me but I'm very excited to have internet that doesnt fucking suck.

Once were moved and a bit more settled, I'm gonna start really digging into to selfhosting things. I have the hardware, a couple HP mini PCs that will run home assistant and probably a server for various docker things. Nextcloud and immich seem to be the things I've found i wanna use so far. I already have a NAS set up, but was having am issue with it not booting if a monitor isnt plugged in. I bought a dummy plug for it but haven't tried it out yet.

Will also be setting up an AI server for local LLM use. Hope to train one to fit my needs once I pull the trigger on 3060 12GB card but need to figure out what other parts I'll use. Might upgrade my main rig and use the parts from that, or maybe I'll buy a old dell and fix it up. Not sure yet.

Lots of ideas, so little time lol.

I think you'd be better off just having a controller hook up and that triggers a bash script to start steam in big picture mode or lutris.

You probably could do something like this if you really wanted to but this would be clunky. If you're always turning off the machine after you're done using it, maybe it'd be OK but IMO, it would make more sense to just use KDE plasma and script something to get the functionality that you want.

You wouldn't have to worry about booting things up or shutting them down if you wanna switch between gaming and whatever else, you could easily make changes to it, and it'd likely be less complicated.

Hell even a shortcut that opens it through a button combo or something would work for this. Pair controller, hit a key on your keyboard, boom, steam opens. That can be done through KDE natively through the shortcuts settings. Very easy to setup and something I use a lot.

I don't disagree that snaps aren't the best thing but Ubuntu does allow you to turn off auto updates now if you want and although it took a little extra setup, I also use the .deb version of Firefox right now. It works well. I'm running Kubuntu 24.04.

For servers especially, Ubuntu can be a really good option. I've heard some people actually like snaps for servers because the auto update so its one less this to worry about. Yea you can setup a script to do that too but its a nice to have for some folks.

All that said, its not for everyone, but for servers I think Ubuntu is a good option just for compatibility alone, not to mention the documentation, tutorials, etc.

Thats just my opinion though.