Onihikage

They were trying to send this link and I’m going to strongly disagree with them - that system is a substantial downgrade from a Steam Deck. The GPU is a GT 1030; on top of being Nvidia, it’s 8 years and 4 generations old and was bottom-tier when it was new.

That said, the idea is sound. Buying an actual gaming desktop PC from a few generations ago can be a very budget-friendly option, but shipping an assembled PC is a nightmare for multiple reasons, and even more risky secondhand. If you’re going to buy a used prebuilt PC, find one locally and pick it up yourself, don’t have it shipped to you.

If you were planning to buy parts new and build the computer yourself, I threw together a parts list for an all-AMD system that’s appropriate for Linux (I recommend Bazzite) and has a good price-to-performance ratio; $1200 to beat the pants off a Steam Deck and be very future-proof in terms of hardware features, platform support, and general performance.

If you’re thinking about buying used older-gen parts or a prebuilt system, compare gaming benchmarks of the GPU or CPU you’re looking at to the components in this build to see if it’s an upgrade or downgrade. This is probably the best price-to-performance prebuilt I’ve found in a few minutes on Amazon, couple hundred less than the parts list above, but it’s on the older AM4 platform (5000-series Ryzen), an older generation GPU (6600), and much less storage.

Lastly, obligatory mention of the last PC build guide you’ll ever need. Good luck!

[…] I’d like to be able to backup to my home server. The main thing would probably just be my photos […]

For the photos, since you have a home server, have you heard of Immich? For anything else, there was a time when I could have recommended syncthing-android, but development on that has been discontinued, though you can still try using it. Some privacy-conscious cloud services may allow you to sync app folders, backing up WhatsApp that way, but I have no experience with that.

is the 8a likely to drop much in price after that? I don’t know how quickly the prices drop but considering the 8a is currently £500 I can’t see it dropping to <£300

Instead of buying straight from Google, you can consider buying a refurbished 8a off ebay or something local - my last two Pixel purchases have been through that method. It tends to be substantially cheaper than buying new, even as little as 6 months after the product launch, and the 8a launched 9 months ago. Just be cautious of seller ratings, reputations, and consistency - prices are lower there because it’s more of a risk for the buyer.

https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e

Thanks for the link, that’s a lot more context than the usual reactionary “Andy Yen said one nice thing about a Republican therefore he’s fascist pro-Trump MAGA” takes I’ve been seeing. Not only does it more or less disprove that narrative, it makes me question how much of the hate against him lately is genuine and how much of it has been seeded and signal-boosted by nation-state actors who don’t want people to use encrypted communications.

Yen is clearly trying to be nonpartisan and praise what he sees as good for privacy while pointing out abuses of power, regardless of who has the power at the moment. He sees this as his way of adding weight to the scale in favor of better privacy and tearing down big tech. I know many in my country and on the web are hyper-polarized and addicted to anger, to the point that if someone says anything even slightly positive about their perceived political enemy, it’s seen as legitimizing and aligning with that enemy, but I don’t believe that’s a healthy or productive mindset to have. I believe that kind of divisive attitude is preventing us from uniting with those who should be agreeable to our cause, and that’s exactly what the oligarchs want. It’s making us weak.

I’ve been on the fence for a while since this whole thing started, because I do use a paid Proton email, and it sounded bad, but I kept getting this nagging feeling I wasn’t seeing the full picture. That’s gone now - Andy may be politically and/or socially inept, and he may have a different perspective on what it means to support privacy and democracy, but I think it’s clear his heart is in the right place, and the work he and Proton are continuing to do for tech privacy is helping to erode authoritarian power structures, including Trump’s.

How can you catch the right fish, unless you’re routinely casting your fishing net?

It’s a technique called Keyword Spotting (KWS). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_spotting

This uses a tiny speech recognition model that’s trained on very specific words or phrases which are (usually) distinct from general conversation. The model being so small makes it extremely optimized even before any optimization steps like quantization, requiring very little computation to process the audio stream to detect whether the keyword has been spoken. Here’s a 2021 paper where a team of researchers optimized a KWS to use just 251uJ (0.00007 milliwatt-hours) per inference: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.04988

The small size of the KWS model, required for the low power consumption, means it alone can’t be used to listen in on conversations, it outright doesn’t understand anything other than what it’s been trained to identify. This is also why you usually can’t customize the keyword to just anything, but one of a limited set of words or phrases.

This all means that if you’re ever given an option for completely custom wake phrases, you can be reasonably sure that device is running full speech detection on everything it hears. This is where a smart TV or Amazon Alexa, which are plugged in, have a lot more freedom to listen as much as they want with as complex of a model as they want. High-quality speech-to-text apps like FUTO Voice Input run locally on just about any modern smartphone, so something like a Roku TV can definitely do it.

Always has been.

I would recommend against pairing Battlemage with a low-spec CPU. As shown by Hardware Canucks, Hardware Unboxed, and others, Intel’s Arc graphics driver overhead is currently much higher than competitors, which means they’re disproportionately affected by having a weaker CPU. This causes the B580 to lose significantly more performance when paired with low-end CPUs than a roughly equivalent Nvidia or AMD card. At the very low end, the difference is especially stark. In some games, the B580 goes from neck-and-neck with a 4060 on a high-end CPU to losing half its performance with a low-end older CPU, while the 4060 only loses about 25%.

If you’re really stuck with a lower-end CPU, it would be far better to get a used midrange AMD or Nvidia GPU from an older product generation for the same price and use that.

I’m late to the party but have you seen Linux Journey? https://linuxjourney.com/

Have you ever seen Linux Journey? It’s a very informative set of tutorials on how Linux fundamentally works under the hood; all the separate systems that together create an operating system. The concepts you learn there will apply to almost any distro in some way, even if some distros (like Atomic ones) don’t let you mess with all of it.

For more top-level transition concerns, given that you’re coming from stock Debian running KDE… Bazzite can also run KDE, so provided you select KDE when you download it, your GUI experience should be pretty much identical. Some minor but important differences would include themes, but there are guides for that, too.

When it comes to package management, the intent on Atomic systems is you basically don’t install traditional packages (Flatpaks are the preferred option), but Bazzite has frameworks in place such that you can install pretty much any package from any distro, as laid out in their documentation I linked in my previous post and just now. Work is also ongoing to make traditional package-based software installations more seamless with an incoming switch from rpm-ostree to bootc, but that’s getting into the weeds. If you have a deb file for a GUI program that’s not available as a Flatpak, you’ll be using a Distrobox to install it.

If you have any specific concerns about the differences, let me know and I can hopefully give you more details.

I can highly recommend Bazzite for your needs. It has a KDE version which is clearly your favorite Desktop Environment (DE), it’s extremely safe/stable due to being an Atomic distro (you can always boot into the previous image if a system update broke something), has incredible documentation, supports almost any traditional app through Distrobox (VPN requires rpm-ostree for now), has a scripted easy install of Waydroid for native android emulation, and has a few tweaks preconfigured to ensure the desktop gaming experience is a little more seamless out of the box than a stock distro. It really seems to tick all the boxes for what you’re looking for.

If you want more focus on development and less on gaming, the Universal Blue team also makes Aurora for more developer-focused workloads, but Steam not being included in the image does introduce some usability regressions - Steam running via Flatpak or Distrobox is just plain less capable than a native install, though work is ongoing to make native installs Just Work even on Atomic systems.

People really out here treating their web browser like it’s a mainframe

My favorite response to that currently is "Okay, send me your email password and show me all your credit cards. Oh, why not? You’ve done nothing wrong, so you have nothing to hide, right?

Audile is on F-droid, though it uses AudD for the actual music recognition backend. I’m not sure it’s possible to have a FOSS backend for this kind of service.

Are we still talking about the OP? The idea that it’s wrong to curse someone out because you disagree with their take is not “politics that inherently goes against FOSS philosophy.” Foss grows faster when more people get involved and contribute. If the most vocal contributors treat everyone they disagree with like shit, they will demoralize their community and make others stop wanting to contribute. That kills projects.

In general, Bazzite being immutable just means the core system isn’t modular to the end user to the degree that Arch is. You of course can use flatpaks or appimages like any distro, and there are still several ways to install traditional rpm/deb/aur programs (the usual Fedora method doesn’t work because dnf doesn’t exist). If it’s just an app that doesn’t require significant integration with the OS, the recommendation is to install them into a distrobox container (where dnf does exist) and then distrobox-export [program] to make them visible to the host system. VPNs need a little more integration so those are installed by layering with rpm-ostree and then enabling the systemd service(s). Layering makes updates take longer to install so it should be avoided when possible.

One of the interesting things about Universal Blue’s images like Bazzite is if you want the benefits of atomic while also having a more custom system than they offer without having to install a bunch of things in rpm-ostree, the process to build a custom image based on one of theirs is apparently quite easy to do and automate, though I haven’t done it myself.

In general, yes. Most of the difficulty is due to being on Linux and running games through the Proton/WINE compatibility layer, so there can be an extra layer of jank involved, but it’s very possible.

If modding consists of dropping files into the game directory, it will work almost exactly the same as in Windows. However, if some of those files replace the game’s DLLs, then whatever WINE runner you use might need to be told to use the DLLs in the game directory instead of its own.

If you need to use a mod manager, that situation is still not ideal - native Linux mod managers I know of are only the Nexus Mods app (very new, there’s some talk of it being integrated directly into the Heroic launcher) and Limo. Everything else, you’ll be running whatever bespoke Windows mod manager your game uses through Proton/WINE, probably with Steam Tinker Launch, possibly Lutris.

tl;dr There can be an extra layer of complexity over modding on Windows, but it’s otherwise comparable.

During boot, you’re presented with 4 snapshots you can choose between so if an update did happen to break something, it’s easy as just choosing an older snapshot after a reboot.

Those are actually just two snapshots, there’s a bug in GRUB that displays them twice. Purely visual, and you can fix it with a ujust script, run in the terminal with ujust configure-grub. There are lots of little scripted tweaks and installations available; you can get most of the list by running ujust by itself. Incredible work by the maintainers.

The dreaded onosecond happens to the best of us.

PCGameBenchmark seems to be exactly what you’re looking for.

You could try FreeFileSync. I use it for pretty much your exact use case, though my music library is much smaller and changes less often, so I haven’t tinkered with its automation. Manual sync works like a dream.