fhein

A few years ago my wife and I built a computer out of old parts for her friend's then 10 years old son. Last month we were visiting them, and I heard the wife's friend say something funny that I thought I'd share with you.

They live on the other side of the city, this was the kid's first computer, and his mom doesn't have much computer experience either, so our goal was to build something that was easy to use and hard to break from the beginning. Originally I choose ElementaryOS since it seemed to fit the bill, but after a year or two it turned out that it couldn't be upgraded to a new major version without a full reinstall so it got stuck with an older version. We didn't visit that often, and the kid's games still worked so it wasn't a major issue until Factorio broke due to glibc incompatibility.

When his birthday was coming up last month we bought him a SSD to make the computer a little bit zippier without a major upgrade, and I thought I'd give him a brand new Linux experience too, so I asked for advice here and in the end chose Bazzite. While I was helping the kid with the installation, I overheard his mom saying in the other room:

This Linux thing.. We've never had any problems with it, he just clicks something to install it and it works. Unlike normal computers, where you always have to do things and fix them.

Perhaps not the most eloquent, but I consider it a very good review.

Lite fredagsunderhållning åt folket

Couldn't find a dedicated community for distro recommendations, I hope it's ok to ask here.

A couple of years ago my wife and I built a computer and gave it to a friend's kid. We put ElementaryOS on it since that seemed pretty fool-proof, but it appears to require a re-install to upgrade major versions so it has been stuck with an old glibc and because of that he can't play Factorio.

For his 13:th birthday we bought him a SSD so it would be a good time to reinstall Linux, but is there perhaps some better choice than ElementaryOS? They live quite far away so I can't easily pop over to fix his computer if something breaks, we don't spend enough time there for me to teach him to fix things himself, and he doesn't seem very interested in learning how computers/operatings systems work either.

• Hardware: Some old Intel CPU with 8GB DDR3 and a GTX1080
• Usage: Gaming through Steam+Proton, Lutris and browsing.
• Requirements: Games work, OS never breaks on updates. Doesn't need to be "kid proof", I don't think he touches any stuff he doesn't know what it does.

In case anyone isn't familiar with llama.cpp and GGUF, basically it allows you to load part of the model to regular RAM if you can't fit all of it in VRAM, and then it splits the inference work between CPU and GPU. It is of course significantly slower than running a model entirely on GPU, but depending on your use case it might be acceptable if you want to run larger models locally.

However, since you can no longer use the "pick the largest quantization that fits in memory" logic, there are more choices to make when choosing which file to download. For example I have 24GB VRAM, so if I want to run a 70B model I could either use a Q4_K_S quant and perhaps fit 40/80 layers in VRAM, or a Q3_K_S quant and maybe fit 60 layers instead, but how will it affect speed and text quality? Then there are of course IQ quants, which are supposedly higher quality than a similar size Q quant, but possibly a little slower.

In addition to the quantization choice, there are additional flags which affect memory usage. For example I can opt to not offload the KQV cache, which would slow down inference, but perhaps it's a net gain if I can offload more model layers instead? And I can save some RAM/VRAM by using a quantized cache, probably with some quality loss, but I could use the savings to load a larger quant and perhaps that would offset it.

Was just wondering if someone has already done experiments/benchmarks in this area, did not find any exact comparisons on search engines. Planning to do some benchmarks myself but not sure when I have time.

Update: Bug fixed in Plasma 6.3.1

Just posting this since I spent over an hour trying to figure out why I couldn't open my desktop today.. After booting and logging in I got a black screen. Switched to a terminal but did not see any obvious errors in the logs.

Not fixed for Fedora 41 KDE yet, so I installed plasma-workspace-x11 to use in the meanwhile. Anyone who hasn't updated to 6.3 yet could probably change their display settings to not use ICC profiles to avoid it.___

I just spent half an hour trying to figure this out so I thought I'd write it down somewhere in case it helps someone else in the future.

Aslain's modpack contains a whole lot of quality-of-life mods for WoWs, for example Battle Expert (formerly known as Navigator) which shows the exact relative angles between your ship and the enemy's. Almost feels like cheating to me, but Wargaming has endorsed this modpack and it even has a dedicated channel on the official discord server. Theoretically you have the same information without the mod, but it can be difficult to see how a ship is turning or changing speed by just looking at it.

These instructions are for when the game is installed through Steam, which looks like it uses some kind of overlay filesystem. This led to that the game install folder didn't show up for the modpack installer when I tried other methods.

1. Install protontricks, I used the version available in Fedora's repos.
2. Download the modpack installer from the official site
3. Find the WoWs install folder in Steam. Right-click World of Warships in the Steam games list, select Manage and "Browse local files" and the folder should open in your default file manager.
4. In a terminal, run the modpack installer .exe file in the game's Wine prefix. I'm not entirely sure this makes any difference compared to running it in a new prefix as long as it can access the game files, it mostly seemed convenient to me. The app id for WoWs is 552990 and it should never change, but you can get it with protontricks -l if you're curious. Change the file path so that it matches the file you downloaded and run:
   protontricks-launch --appid 552990 ~/Downloads/Aslains_WoWs_Modpack_Installer_v.13.6.1_01.exe
   It will print a lot of "failed to create" error messages for system dlls and exes, but that appears to be normal, and the setup window should open after a while.
5. After some release notes etc. the installer will eventually ask you for the game's install dir. As far as I can tell, the game files do not show up anywhere on C:, but Steam mounts your Linux file system on Z: so we can use that instead. Browse to the game install folder, which we located in step 3, and select it. My install folder on Linux is
   /mnt/faststore/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/World of Warships/ so I select
   Z:\mnt\faststore\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\World of Warships in the modpack installer.
6. Either manually select the mods you want or use the recommended selection. As I wrote before, many for these mods feel like they give you an in-game advantage over other players, but WG has said they're legal...
7. The first time I ran the installer it hung on "Finishing installation". It appears to happen to a few Windows users too but the mod dev doesn't know what causes it. I noticed that there was a cleanup process running in Wine C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /C DEL /s /f *.orig which shouldn't take so long time so I killed it (in Linux) and the installer continued. The next time I ran it this didn't happen, and it only took a few seconds to finish the installation.

If you have the game installed as standalone, e.g. Lutris, then I think you can just run the modpack installer in the same Wine prefix, and you should see the game's install folder under C:\Program Files as you would on Windows. I.e. select the game in Lutris, click the tiny arrow next to the wine glass button and select "Run EXE inside Wine prefix" and then choose the installer you downloaded. But I haven't done this so I promise nothing.

Please don't take this as an endorsement of World of Warships, I borderline hate this game and only play it because some of my friends are obsessed with it. The gameplay is a bit too slow paced for my taste, there are a lot of hard counters which you can't do anything about in random matchmaking, and carriers (planes) can turn any game into pure suffering. I also dislike the game's monetization scheme, lootboxes are expensive and most have a tiny chance to give something really good and a big chance to give you complete garbage. The game might be f2p, but at higher tiers it becomes unplayable without a premium subscription (€10/month) since ship maintenance gets more expensive than your earnings. To maximize your ship's performance you need a high level captain, expensive modules and also buffs which are consumed each game. My friend tries to argue that the game is not pay-to-win because you can also grind ingame resources to buy those, but you'll spend many hours playing at a disadvantage if you don't buy your way past it. Just my personal opinion of course.

If you despite my warnings felt an urge to try this game (honestly I thought it was quite fun at lower tiers) then check if any of your friends are already playing it and ask them for a referral code. Both of you get free stuff from being recruited by someone else and once you've created an account it's too late, unless you stop playing completely for 3 months. If you do that it is possible for your friend to send you a recruiting link if you want to start playing again.

Just a heads up, I've read that it's impossible to connect an existing wargaming.net account to a Steam account on Linux, so make sure you authenticate through Steam when you create the account if you plan on playing it through Steam. Though if you have Windows dual boot then I think you can link the accounts there if you need to.

Going through some boxes and found a stack of old White Dwarf. I'll keep the first issue I ever bought as a memory but planning to get rid of the rest. Just wanted to check if there are people collecting these before they go into the recycling bin. If anyone's interested I can make a list of which ones I have, and I'll send them to anyone willing to pay for postage. Located in Sweden.

Any games with less than 1000 total Steam reviews you've enjoyed and thought more people ought to know about? Not a hard limit, just a guideline for what could be classified as "undiscovered" on Steam, assuming it wasn't released yesterday.

I would recommend:

• Full Bore, a cute block-based puzzle platformer. Solid mechanics, level designs and even a somewhat engaging story. ~~Unfortunately hasn't been on a sale since 2021 according to steampricehistory.com, while it was frequently reduced to €2-3 before that. Not sure I'd recommend it to everybody at full price, but IMO it's one of the best indie platformers I've played.~~ edit: Did someone email the creator of Full Bore or something? It's suddenly on sale again, for the first time in ages :) Go buy it!

I have calibrated my monitors to create icc profiles, they show up in KDE color management and everything used to work exactly as it should. Now every time I start my computer it goes like this:

1. I log in to my account
2. It shows my desktop, with the right colour correction.
3. After a few seconds the colours revert to look un-calibrated on both monitors.
4. I restart the colord service and it loads the colour correction again.

As an alternative to step 4, if I go to KDE colour settings, select the default profile and then back to my profile then it also starts looking good again.

This problem must've started a week or two ago, but unfortunately I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly when. I haven't touched anything related to colour management in months, and don't think I've done any changes to my system other than upgrading packages.

Can't see anything colour related in the syslog except colord loading the correct profiles. I removed all the old profiles that I wasn't using anyway. I removed dispcal's profile loader from autostart to make sure it wasn't interfering with something. The profiles are both installed system wide and in my user folder.

Using Fedora 39 KDE.

Anyone have any idea what could be wrong, or even how to debug this?

Only played it for an hour but it's pretty good so far, if you like this type of gameplay. Feels somewhere in between Hell Let Loose and Battlefield 1. Native Linux version.

I'm trying to learn more about LLMs, but I haven't found any explanation for what determines which prompt template format a model requires.

For example meta-llama's llama-2 requires this format:

...INST and <> tags, BOS and EOS tokens...

But if I instead download's TheBloke's version of llama-2 the prompt template should instead be:

SYSTEM: ...

USER: {prompt}

ASSISTANT:

I thought this would have been determined how the original training data was formatted, but afaik TheBloke only converted the llama-2 models from one format to another. Looking at the documentation for the GGML format I don't see anything related to the prompt being embedded in the model file.

Anyone who understands this stuff who could point me in the right direction?

Maybe I'm using the wrong terms, but what I'm wondering is if people are running services at home that they've made accessible from the internet. I.e. not open to the public, only so that they can use their own services from anywhere.

I'm paranoid a f when it comes to our home server, and even as a fairly experienced Linux user and programmer I don't trust myself when it comes to computer security. However, it would be very convenient if my wife and I could access our self-hosted services when away from home. Or perhaps even make an album public and share a link with a few friends (e.g. Nextcloud, but I haven't set that up yet).

Currently all our services run in docker containers, with separate user accounts, but I wouldn't trust that to be 100% safe. Is there some kind of idiot proof way to expose one of the services to the internet without risking the integrity of the whole server in case it somehow gets compromised?

How are the rest of you reasoning about security? Renting a VPS for anything exposed? Using some kind of VPN to connect your phones to home network? Would you trust something like Nextcloud over HTTPS to never get hacked?