It was definitely a steeper learning curve than it is today, especially wrangling drivers for audio and Wi-Fi.

Depending on your hardware steam OS might actually be a better fit if you’re willing to do a little tweaking, because of the gaming mode. I find I really enjoy having the ability to switch to a desktop experience when I want it, but dedicate all the system resources when I’m gaming. Really makes a huge difference in performance.

I’ve also been reliably informed that CachyOS is also reliably good as a gaming distro.

All that being said and to your question specifically: there’s a few resources online like the wine community and gamingonlinux that compile compatibility lists and instructions on how to get things working, but lutris is probably the easiest to use and check.

This is the game I’m decompiling

And the repo: https://git.circuitforge.tech/pyr0ball/havoc-remaster/src/branch/main/dev

Oh I’ve been self-hosting since 2009, switched to Linux in 2011, finally ditched Windows as a daily driver last year when I picked up a Legion Go and got it loaded up with steam OS.

I’ve distro-hopped quite a lot between then and now, but funny enough I ended up landing where I started when recommending a newbie friendly distro: mint with kde plasma. That’s my desktop daily driver now. I’ve tried bleeding edge in many different flavors and always end up finding I can start from a stable baseline and customize the kernel and modules as needed. Now I’ve got all my favorite emulators and recompiled games working flawlessly, and I’ve started working on a decomp of my own for an old Windows 98 game. I’ve already successfully ported it and fixed a few runtime bugs, trying to get it fully stable before I start remastering it in godot.

Server-side, I tend to stick with either Debian or Rocky and build on top of those.

Definitely not a universal experience. I hope you have a better one here!

Are you just new to lemmy or Linux or something else?

FYI I got the demo spun up this week!

https://oasis.circuitforge.tech/

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making things fool proof is that fools are quite ingenious little buggers.

That’s my specialty! My goal with my projects has always been to lower the barrier to entry while compromising as little as possible on things that matter. I remember everything Google and Apple built before they started dumbing it down and removing features. I remember how much effort went into onboarding users and making sure people could adopt things easily. It didn’t always work, but I’ve been very successful in making my entire de-google’d stack useful to my own family.

The hardest part is done, now I just need to make it replicable for others to spin up their own. If you’re interested, I’ve got a repo scaffolded but I haven’t published the actual stack installer yet: https://git.circuitforge.tech/Circuit-Forge/turaco/issues

Saying it’ll never happen and giving up won’t make that 2% get any bigger

Make the tools easy enough that the irritation of the original platform gives them enough of a push to try something easy to use.

If you want to help beta test, I’m working on an appliance-level automated installer for provisioning home cloud servers.

Got friends who need help? Help them or send them my way (or to your nearest techie)

Decouple people from big tech, allow people to run, fix, and maintain their own hardware instead of replacing it on an industrial scale every 6-9 months and centralizing ownership in data centers.

My entire stack runs off a 14kw solar array with a battery. Net negative. It’s totally doable.

Edit: also I tested my stack against a stimulated 1k active users and couldn’t get it to break a sweat, so I’m not saying everyone needs to do things this way, but your techiest uncle could host the entire family in a privacy cooperative, for instance

LLM and VLM are generally the type of model that needs a ton of resources to run. Birdnet uses an audio classification model, but there are dozens of types of models.

I’m building specialized task-focused pipelines which keep the memory footprint small for self-hosted users, and I’m working on a unified framework too make building other pipelines and applications much easier: https://docs.circuitforge.tech/

If you give me some details on what you’re after I might be able to find you some projects or at least clarify keywords

Edit: an example of how efficient these can get, I have a little ESP32-driven waveshare display running an ONNX wake-word detection model which is absolutely nuts. 4mb psram and a dual-core 240mhz cpu and its only job is handling “hey Mycroft” and establishing a proper speech-to-text connection with my server downstairs

Specialized models can be made incredibly efficient. The big tech guys are trying to replace humans which is why their crap takes such huge servers to run. Building local-first/only just means you need to specialize the model and the pipeline to match what you’re doing