This is it right here, at least for me personally. I’m a huge Dragon Age fan (played through DAO and DA2 before Inquisition’s release) who has always been vaguely interested in Larian’s Divinity Original Sin games but never made them a priority in my backlog. Seeing the cinematic cutscenes and the 3rd-person voice acted dialog for BG3 made me immediately interested and now I’m 10-ish hours deep into Baldur’s Gate and loving it!

Also slowly resigning myself to DA4 not even coming close to matching BG3 in quality given the circumstances of its development.

I’m curious, how are you discovering new music this way? my understanding of soulseek and nicotine+ is that they’re great for finding music by artists you already know, but idk how they would work for discovery…?

I don’t know anything about GPU design but expandable VRAM is a really interesting idea. Feels too consumer friendly for Nvidia and maybe even AMD though.

very cool! loving these low-res rices - there’s something really appealing about them. this also reminds me of my chromebook that I’ve done a similar thing with (turn into a writing-focused machine).

I’m not usually a fan of cursors outside of the regular black & white, but that cursor goes perfectly with the whole theme here!

I can’t believe someone has paid for that domain name for 23 years… O_O

Nice, thanks! I haven’t tried customizing the default KDE bars yet; it’s cool to see they can be changed a decent amount.

Nice, thanks! I haven’t tried customizing the default KDE bars yet; it’s cool to see they can be changed a decent amount.

What are you using for your top bar?

I like the friendlier feeling of Seaford (the o shapes have a little tilt to them rather than being straight on the grid), but I’m guessing they leaned towards the most “generic” of the five because as a default font you want it to become “invisible” almost. I think a more unique font would stand out and then become a little grating over time given how much it would be seen.

Really clean! Now you just need to theme that pihole dashboard to Nord too ;)

Yup; hopefully there are some advances in the training space, but I’d guess that having large quantities of VRAM is always going to be necessary in some capacity for training specifically.

Yup; hopefully there are some advances in the training space, but I’d guess that having large quantities of VRAM is always going to be necessary in some capacity for training specifically.

So I’m no expert at running local LLMs, but I did download one (the 7B vicuña model recommended by the LocalLLM subreddit wiki) and try my hand at training a LoRA on some structured data I have.

Based on my experience, the VRAM available to you is going to be way more of a bottleneck than PCIe speeds.

I could barely hold a 7B model in 10 GB of VRAM on my 3080, so 8 GB might be impossible or very tight. IMO to get good results with local models you really have large quantities of VRAM and be using 13B or above models.

Additionally, when you’re training a LoRA the model + training data gets loaded into VRAM. My training dataset wasn’t very large, and even so, I kept running into VRAM constraints with training.

In the end I concluded that in the current state, running a local LLM is an interesting exercise but only great on enthusiast level hardware with loads of VRAM (4090s etc).

Using it to separate work from other uses makes sense to me - I think if I worked from my desktop rather than the company laptop, I’d be more inclined to use the virtual desktops.

Wanting to pin a floating window was always something I wanted on Windows, so I was excited to see that being natively supported by KDE.

Agree on disliking alt-tab because it’s non-deterministic! Cycling through a whole list of apps has always felt clunky to me so I never use it.

I really wish I could load Sway on my desktop… unfortunately I’ve got an Nvidia card and I couldn’t get the live ISO to boot with sway. :<

Very tempting to try it on my laptop though! All the setups I’ve seen using it look really clean.

How far away from your monitor do you sit to see all of the 49”?! It must all be in your peripheral vision, haha. (Edit: oh, I overlooked the ultra wide mention and was picturing a 49” tv type thing, haha. Ultra wide makes more sense!)

I actually went down from two monitors on my desktop to one… nothing wrong with the second monitor now sitting in my closet, but I’m liking the extra space on my desk and it feels more ergonomic to not be swiveling my neck as much.

It’s so interesting the different ways people organize their windows! I have a strong preference for never overlapping windows where possible at home, but on my work computer it happens all the time and I don’t mind. Each window definitely has its own “zone” on the screen though (browser in the upper left, slack in the bottom right, finder in the bottom middle, and so forth).

I’ve accidentally tried to switch workspaces with the i3 shortcuts when on a windows machine before! that muscle mememory, haha.

when I’m booting Windows on my desktop, I use MS PowerToys to snap windows around which gives me the same feeling of nice organization as tiling but feels more intuitive in the Windows environment for me.