Yarr !, my experience has been stellar ;) (Gaben: It’s a service problem…)

know truth from fiction.

You jest, but…

You are aware that Netflix et.al. put compression on their streams (usually quite a bit in regards to bitrate) ? It is often the case that BluRay rips etc. are available better on the high seas…

While I generally agree and consider this insightful, it behooves us to remember the (actual, 1930s) Nazis did it with newspapers, radio and rallies (… in a cave, with a box of scraps).

Not sure I’d use either, but may I suggest both, with a clear caveat that one or both may disappear or change ? Throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks…

Thinkpads have long had first tier linux support, in fact many models have shipped with linux for at least a decade (?), checking that is a really good way to be sure, but you’re going to be fine with W, P, T, X lines, many enthusiasts make light work. They were deployed (might still be) to Red Hat kernel devs for a long time, which helps things along. Fingerprint drivers tend to be proprietary and hit or miss, but passwords work.

Honestly learning to install linux yourself, and configure it to your liking, is actually, imo, a really important path to learning and you’re likely doing yourself a disservice avoiding it. It’s part of the avoidance of vendor lock in you want. Installation is surprisingly easy now, start with something simple, Mint is often recommended these days, find a decent, recent, youtube and you’ll probably be up and running in an hour. Find the apps you need for your workflow (which will take considerably longer). Get familiar with the terminal. Best thing you can do after that is burn it down and install a new distro, leaving any mistakes behind, keeping your list of apps. Arch if you want to get really deep into it, or Fedora / Bazzite are good choices and very stable. Best of luck.

I replied to @[email protected] and understood the question like “Is distrobox as secure as QubesOS?”, which I replied with “No”.

Ahh, fair cop. Good point on Secureblue, but my threat model doesn’t take me there.

Eh, it’s fedora under the hood with SELinux enabled, and immutable, better than most security wise, I didn’t say much more.

Bazzite is the better distro because you install things in a distrobox. Muck around, break things in there, but your main distro stays safe, secure and stable.

You can cycle the smaller drives to cold backup, that’s not a waste. You do have backups, which RAID is not, right?

Sure, works fine for inference with tensor parallelism, USB4 / thunderbolt 4/5 is a better (40Gbit+ and already there) bet than ethernet (see distributed-llama). Trash for training / fine tuning, that needs higher inter GPU speed, or better a bigger GPU VRAM.

Seems like data integrity is your highest priority, and you’re doing pretty well, the next step is keeping a copy offsite. It’s the 3-2-1 backup strategy, 3 copies, 2 media (used to mean CDs etc but now think offline drives) 1 offsite (in case of fire, meteor strike etc), so look to that, stash a copy at a friends or something.

In your case I’d look at getting some online storage to fill the offsite role while you’re overseas (paid probably, but a year of 1 or 2 Tb is quite reasonable) leaving you with no pressure on the selfhosting side, just tailscale in, muck around and have fun, and if something breaks, no harm done, data safe.

I’ve done it for what seems like forever and I’d still be worried about leaving a system out of physical control for any extended period of time, at the very least having someone to reboot it if connectivity or power fails will be invaluable, but talking them through a broken update is another thing entirely, and you shouldn’t make that a critical necessity, too much stress.

I say go for the desktop for grunty work and pick up an older thinkpad for the mobile use case or just remote in with your macbook. I have a T580 (last of the dual batteries, infinite battery life baby), works an absolute treat on linux and next best build quality to a macbook but with a repair manual and massive upgradeability.

Would’ve sworn Potatohead/Voldemort was a caretaker and they’d switch for the election. Instead the shit stain is neck and neck (according to Murdoch polls). Wtf is wrong with this country, we see Trump and go ‘hold my beer’. May not be the worst timeline, but it ain’t good.

You don’t say what else other than gaming you want to do, so it’s harder to advise. Still, consider bazzite KDE, easy, stable, relatively close to the bleeding edge without all the cuts, everything you need for gaming in the tin.