Can’t speak to all of your points, but the main thing I’d recommend is to try distro hopping with some of the common recommendations. If you have a spare drive that would be the easiest. Mint and PopOS are probably the first two worth trying to see how things go.

In terms of games, you should really be checking protondb for compatibility. It shows the C&C series generally looking pretty good. If you’re out of the loop, Proton is essentially an improved version of Wine that Valve maintains that’s focused on games, but it’s free for anyone to use.

For text editors, there are an insane number of options. I’ve been pretty impressed with Kate from the KDE folks. Ties in best with a KDE-based flavor of Linux, but works great everywhere. Codium is a fork of VSCode that strips out all of Microsoft’s telemetry. Also great to use and very powerful with insane flexibility through plugins.

Regarding fragmentation across distros, you’re mainly looking at RPM-based (Fedora, Suse), deb-based (Debian, Ubuntu, and a whole slew of others based on those). Most programs will be bundled up as a deb or rpm. Efforts have been made to make more platform-neutral packages for distribution like Flatpaks, Snaps, and AppImages. Those have their quirks, and people have strong opinions about their merits and weaknesses, but generally you’ll be able to get those to work on any distro without much fuss. There are some cool utilities like Distrobox which do a pretty good job of setting up containers for different distros so you can install and run their native packages.

I’m not much of a programmer and I don’t host any public sites, but how feasible would it be to build an equivalent of Night Shade but for LLMs that site operators could run?

I’m thinking strategies akin to embedding loads of unrendered links to pages full of junk text. Possibly have the junk text generated by LLMs and worsened via creative scripting.

It would certainly cost more bandwidth but might also reveal more bad actors. Are modern scrapers sophisticated enough to not be fooled into pulling in that sort of junk data? Are there any existing projects doing this sort of thing?

I’ve got an R3 at home which generally works well. Flashing mainline OpenWRT was pretty smooth and easy. It’s been a while since I did the bring up, but I do remember having to jump through some hoops to get a partition layout that would utilize the onboard storage properly. By default it only left 10mb to install additional packages which seemed to defeat the purpose of having all of that emmc available. That may have changed in the more recent releases.

One bug I encounter regularly is that some (maybe older?) Apple devices seem to be able to lock up the router. Adding watchcat can get the thing rebooted in less than a minute in the event that it does hang, which makes it barely noticeable, but it’s not an ideal fix.

Depending on the devices you have in your house that might be a showstopper or of no consequence at all. Otherwise WiFi speeds and signal are great, as are general performance and reliability except for that bug I mentioned. Haven’t used VLANs but it’s all there and the flexibility of OpenWRT is great.

If I understand it correctly, Bluefin was just the first downstream uBlue variant like Aurora that had the various goodies built into the images. Bluefin effectively being the Gnome version of Aurora. I think it was simpler to tie the Aurora builds into the existing Bluefin pipeline for generating images and packages.

I highly recommend Aurora (dx) if it sounds like it fits the bill for what you’re looking for. After starting out with Kinoite and rebasing on Aurora-dx, the latter just feels like Kinoite with all of the desired additional packages already baked in, and some great additional shell scripts for convenience.

Rebasing sounded intimidating but it was literally just a simple shell command and a reboot. One additional command if you want to hang onto the previous image the way you had it. Rpm-ostree is pretty magical.

I was just reading an article about Homeworld 3 and it sounds like I was mistaken about the online/skirmish thing. It sounds like it’s some sort of PvE coop mode or something. Still not my cup of tea. Still excited for the single player campaign.

I’m with you on the patient gaming. With few exceptions, purchasing the new hotness on day 1 means paying more for a worse experience. By the time a game goes on sale, the major bugs and balance issues will have all been fixed (if they’ll get fixed at all), so what’s the rush? Most gamers these days, myself included, have big enough backlogs that we’ll never be in the position of not having something fun available to play anyway.

I tried out Lightyear Frontier and Homeworld 3.

Lightyear Frontier made for a generally pleasant low-stakes low-stress first person farming game. The mech aspect had some minor jank in places, but nothing I think the developer can’t smooth out with some minimal adjustments. Seems like a good game to relax with.

Homeworld 3 looks beautiful. I played through the tutorial and it’s got me hyped for the full game. Only complaint was that there isn’t a proper single player level to the demo. It appears to just be a tutorial and skirmish/online, and I’m not a competitive multiplayer guy.

You might be able to get by with the power supply but 750+ watts is recommended for a 3090. Any B550 motherboard should be totally fine.

For what it’s worth I’m running a 5950X, 3090, a pair of water pumps, and 11 fans all off a 750 watt Corsair PSU and I’ve never experienced any instability or signs of an insufficient PSU.

If it were me in your situation, I’d just pick up a decent 750-800 watt PSU, and upgrade the memory to a decent 32 gig memory kit while I’m at it just to have a little better time. 3600mhz with decent timings seems to be the sweet spot. Otherwise, as long as the GPU fits the case, you should be in great shape to run it.