data1701d

joined 2 years ago
[–] data1701d@startrek.website 3 points 1 month ago

Not really.

Ampere's for servers; if you have the cash to blow, you can get a fancy workstation, but not a laptop. It's really a shame; I think Ampere might be able to do well in the consumer CPU market if they wanted to face Qualcomm (and assuming they can get their single core performance up). A lot of their hardware seems to follow standards pretty well.

Graviton is only used internally inside Amazon and not sold to customers.

The only semi-decent ARM laptops you can get right now are Snapdragon ones, some of which kind of support Linux but with a lot of caveats and obnoxious quarks.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I have to have Windows for my university's test-taking spyware, so I just have a barebones 11 LTSC installed on a secondary drive.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 12 points 1 month ago

I just looked it up, and it seems a lot of the pre-Apple Silicon MacBook had swappable airport cards that used a completely standard mini PCIE slot. From a cursory google search, it looks completely possible to swap in something like an Intel Wi-Fi card that is supported natively by the kernel.

A mini-PCIE Wi-Fi modem can be had for not too expensive, around the $30 range; in fact, if you have a good stack of old Wintel laptops, one of those might have a card that works well. In fact, I did that with my sister‘s laptop (although she was using Windowd) – her Realtek Wi-Fi card was causing endless misery, so I ripped the Intel modem out of an ultra book from circa 2016 and put it in her laptop. No more issues.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 10 points 1 month ago

Exactly. Luckily, back in high school, my IB History class spent a good couple months just learning about authoritarian rulers and their tactics.

I especially like pulling out Pinochet because he’s a clear and relatively recent example of right wing authoritarianism, manipulation of existing religious structures, and US government support of authoritarian regimes that help contextualize its trend towards authoritarianism.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I mean, I had an uncle showing me HTML at 7 (not a programming language, but still). I learned basic JS on Khan Academy at 11, and if I’d known it had existed earlier, I would have started earlier.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 1 points 1 month ago

That's pretty normal for most UEFI x86_64 things up to 2020 or so.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

UEFI first became common on new computers in 2011-2012, so I don’t a lot of 2014 computers were BIOS.

I have a cheapo laptop from 2012 (one of last Gateways) and it’s a UEFI machine.

At this point, I think 15 years ago is a more realistic estimate for the last legacy BIOS machines - my Win7 box with a 1st gen i5 is legacy BIOS.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Mostly, he uses Photoshop for printing, though, and I don’t know if Krita has as powerful a printing dialog.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

My grandfather asked me about Linux, but unfortunately, he’s still using Photoshop for now.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 3 points 2 months ago

+1 for Clevis. I’ve been using it on my laptop for a year and it works like a charm. Sometimes, you need to update bindings after kernel updates, but it’s overall quite smooth.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 2 points 2 months ago

From what I've heard, ROCm may be finally getting out of its infancy; at the very least, I think by the time we get something useful, local, and ethical, it will be pretty well-developed.

Honestly, though, I'm in the same boat as you and actively try to avoid most AI stuff on my laptop. The only "AI" thing I use is I occasionally do an image upscale. I find it kind of useless on photos, but it's sometimes helpful when doing vector traces on bitmap graphics with flat colors; Inkscape's results aren't always good with lower resolution images, so putting that specific kind of graphic through "cartoon mode" upscales sometimes improves results dramatically for me.

Of course, I don't have GPU ML acceleration, so it just runs on the CPU; it's a bit slow, but still less than 10 minutes.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 47 points 2 months ago (13 children)

I feel like most people who use Nvidia on Linux just got their machine before they were Linux users, with a small subset for ML stuff.

Honestly, I hear ROCm may finally be getting less horrible, is getting wider distro support, and supports more GPUs than it used to, so I really hope AMD will become as livable ML dev platform as it is a desktop GPU.

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