xyguy

These seem like ideal machines for workstations, for mom and dad, and for virtualization hosts.

This model, the Beelink EQi12 even has a built in power supply so managing them in a rack is also super handy. And of course the price is not too shabby either.

I have had pretty good luck with these in the past but I'm interested in hearing other's experiences, if any.

I can't imagine that they are 100% on top of firmware updates, but have they had issues in the past with Windows keys or any other shady stuff I should know about?

I use heliboard for my keyboard and quite enjoy it but on the 2023 RAZR+ it only allows Gboard to be used on the outer display. No other keyboard will fail to crash on the front screen.

I know its a niche issue but this is Android. Surely there's a way around it. Either with some kind of context-aware keyboard that only used Gboard on the outer display or some way to get other keyboards working on the front display.

I run a Windows 11 VM on xcp-ng to do testing and Windows specific graphic and video work. I use an old R9 390 in passthrough mode right now but it's running out of steam.

I'm particularly interested in the A380 series of gpus as they have a lot of the modern compute and video encoding features for around $100.

Before I pull the trigger I just wanted to know if anyone has had much experience with ARC GPUs in a VM passthrough scenario. I see in their official docs that resizable BAR is a requirement and I didn't know whether that is handled properly in a virtual environment or on XCP-NG specifically.

Any experience you're willing to share would be most appreciated.

Thanks!

I went out and got the AMD 7800xt to do ultrafast AV1 encoding of large h264 and hevc files.

I am able to select VCN acceleration options in Windows but not Linux Handbrake.

I have tried the flatpak and both the Pop_OS and ppa deb packages of Handbrake. I have the latest mesa driver and am running the most current version of PopOS 22.04. I've had no issues gaming at all, just with picking the hardware encoder in Handbrake. Any ideas or rabbit holes I can go down?

At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.

And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn't constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.

With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don't think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.

My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil's advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the "service problem" of "YouTube piracy"? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?

This is an old article but this is Gabe Newell describing video game piracy as a service problem and why he believes that in case anyone is unfamiliar with it.