Thanks, that’s what I was thinking of but I couldn’t remember details or what it was called.

my knowledge of technical stuff is bretty basic so please be patient with me.

First of all, just from the fact that you’re posting here and asking that kind of question, your knowledge of technical stuff is at least a little bit beyond “pretty basic.”

Second, I get the impression that confusion over exactly what you’re asking for is maybe more due to English not being your first language…? (No judgement if that’s the case; your English is certainly way better than I could do in a second language.)

Anyway, on to actually giving my answer to your question:

• Trying to set up a multiseat system can be tricky in general. If I recall, Other Linus (the one from Linus Tech Tips) has released several videos about that sort of thing over the years, but I don’t think any of the tries were successful enough for him to daily-drive long-term. I know LTT is controversial, but it might be worth taking a look at his experience.

• Trying to do it with GPU passthrough for gaming and 3D modeling adds an additional layer of complexity. I’m a software engineer and have been using Linux exclusively at home for almost a decade (and off and on for many years before that), and even I don’t have GPU passthrough working on my home server. That’s not necessarily to say that it’s super difficult – I haven’t tried very hard to figure it out – just that it isn’t trivial even for somebody with experience.

• If the above has scared you off from the whole “multiseat home server” thing but you still want a home Linux PC for gaming, my distro recommendation would be either bazzite, which I haven’t used, but have heard good things about its appropriateness for that use-case, or boring ol’ Ubuntu (or variant like Kubuntu, depending on your UI preference), which is popular enough to have official support from corporations like Valve and AMD and thus is most likely to “just work.”

• If the above didn’t scare you off from building a home server, I recommend running Proxmox on it.

• As for Nvidia, I fucking hate Nvidia for its CUDA monopoly and would never recommend it out of principle, but I have to grudgingly admit that some stuff just flat-out won’t run on AMD or Intel GPUs. I believe proprietary “niche 3D software” is one of the most likely things to fall into that category, so you may have literally no choice. Check the system requirements of the particular software you plan to use.

• The other features that you might lose out on by not using Nvidia are raytracing and hardware-accelerated PhysX. The AMD 9070 XT allegedly has decent raytracing, but although I own one I haven’t verified that yet because I don’t own any raytraced games. I tried the Half-Life 2 RTX demo, but it failed to start at all. As for PhysX, there are two important things to know: first, that should be improving because Nvidia is working on open-sourcing it. Second, for older games using the older PhysX API, the new 50-series Nvidia cards don’t support them either. Apparently, if you want a decade+ old game like Mirror’s Edge to work properly on your 5090, you’ve got to also have some cheap older Nvidia card alongside it to offload the PhysX calculations to, LOL.

• Speaking of multiple cards, if you want to build a server that supports multiple GPU-accelerated users at the same time, you might consider getting multiple cheaper GPUs instead of one 5090. Although I believe virtually slicing a single GPU for passthrough access by multiple VMs at once may be possible in theory, the phrase “may be possible in theory” should be setting off alarm bells in your mind that it ain’t gonna be easy.

Let me know if you get your Pinephone working well enough to daily-drive, 'cause I’ve got one sitting around collecting dust.

Sigh… Better get out the ol’ PSA:

Don’t Date Robots!

For a minute there I thought there was Chris, Chris, and Brian and that a table of Vikings was about to start chanting “Krebs!”

You mean Brian Krebs?

Duolingo dit que mon niveau de français est 95 (CEFR “high B1”), mais je ne ne me sens pas à l’aise. (J’avais besoin de chercher quelques mots, comme “level” et “fluent,” pour écrire ça.)

Je devrais faire plus d’autre genres d’etudes.

I’d be willing to go out on a limb and say boating westward, from Panama, in the pacific would be basically impossible in a pedestrian boat.

On the contrary, that’s the usual way to do it. Apparently there’s basically a whole flotilla of cruisers who do the passage from the Galapagos to the Marquesas around February each year.

https://www.cruiserswiki.org/wiki/Trans_Pacific_("Puddle-Jump")

As far as I can tell, it’s a lot easier and more popular than trying to traverse eastward (Japan →Hawaii →California). It seems like it’s often the first big ocean crossing cruisers starting in the Caribbean do, being less intimidating than trying to cross the North Atlantic via the Gulf Stream.

Speaking of influencers and “pedestrian” boats, a few years ago a YouTuber named “Wind Hippie Sailing” did the passage in a 27-foot sloop, solo. Apparently it took her 41 days.

Granted, Guyana is probably cheap living, but it’s really difficult to live there without being fluent in French (many of the locals speak French as a second language; relying on English to communicate will be incredibly difficult when French is the unifying language there, not English). The entire département has less than 300K people living there.

The main reason I mentioned it would be if I managed to get a job at the space center, or at least one that’s aerospace-adjacent.

Remember, the tropical overseas départements are generally financially poor and lack opportunities even for locals. There’s a reason why there aren’t giant populations in these tropical places.

I’m still seriously considering buying a boat and becoming nomadic. It would be more of a “work odd jobs to fund the next few months of cruising” kind of thing, not trying to permanently settle on a particular island. It’s just that the timing isn’t ideal because I don’t yet have the budget for as nice of one as I was hoping for. (Also, it’d be years before I got to French Polynesia anyway, since I’d most likely get the boat in the Southeast US before traveling around the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal.)

Otherwise, yeah, for a more traditional lifestyle + getting EU citizenship, I agree metropolitan France (and ideally Paris specifically) would be my best bet.

I’m interested in those places, too. And also Cayenne and Tahiti, for that matter. The other reason I originally picked French to learn instead of Spanish or German or something is that it seems useful for people who want to sail around the world because France has so many overseas tropical islands.

(Montreal does have a particular advantage compared to the rest of Canada in terms of better urbanism, BTW. Check out “Oh the Urbanity” on YouTube.)

At this point, though, I’m interested in any stable democracy that would let me in.

Fuck it; let’s just improve OpenMW ourselves.

Je veux immigrer au Montreal. Ça a l’air d’etre une belle ville.

(I’ve been seeing the writing on the wall for fascism in the US for a while now, and have been learning French to increase my options.)

Maybe you’re thinking of some other case? Mine is a little under 13"x10"x6", about the size of a (large) shoebox:

Granted, not a whole lot else would fit in a backpack along with it, but I’m quite confident it would fit. A stack of three or four textbooks would be bigger.

I can fit my PC in a backpack. It’s got a mini-ITX motherboard, SFX power supply, 240mm AIO water cooler, and an RX 9070 XT in a Lian Li A4-H2O case.

I went to the trouble of building it small mainly because of the possibility that I decide to flee the US. Thanks, Trump. 😡

All UBI proposals I’ve seen don’t get anywhere near what you’d need to live off

Then they aren’t “UBI,” by definition. The “Basic” part means “enough to pay for basic necessities.”

More to the point, what are people supposed to do when all labor is automated and the 1% own all the robots?

Definitely capitalist private enterprise is less trustworthy, and it’s not even close.

Anybody else really starting to feel like a chump for not cheating their way through life?

This is why people need to publish negative results: so future generations of PhD students don’t think their ideas that don’t work are “novel.”

Using a “shitty” OS is forgiveable. Using an actively hostile OS, one that acts in the corporation’s interest at the expense of the user’s, is incomprehensibly insane and beyond the pale.