A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • I think after initial installation, you open a browser with the post-installation step and configure a username and password there. I’m not entirely sure, it’s been some time since I did it. But depending on installation method, I don’t think it has a provided password.

    General password advice: Check caps lock, and if you use like a German keyboard if ‘z’ and ‘y’ are swapped.



  • Concerning the IQ: App development and regular programming aren’t that hard. It needs some time and dedication, and willingness to learn how all these things work and tie together, but I think everyone with an average IQ could do it. It’s specific domains where you need a high IQ, like writing advanced signal processing algorithms. Or write very efficient algorithms or do detailed security audits. But App development is just moderately complex, you can get away with basic math… So I’d say it’s doable. Still needs quite some time and effort though. At least several weeks to months. And the Kotlin book I have has like 800 pages filled with information, and that just takes some time to work through. None of it is magic, though. You do one chapter at a time.

    Vibe coding is overrated IMO. There are applications and clients out there for whom it’s fine if you just do a piss-poor job and throw something together, and it somehow works enough. For a lot of things it’s not advanced enough, yet.


  • Yes. Steam is available on Linux, pretty easy to install and it comes with a compatibility layer (Proton) which works quite well.

    Linux is a bit different than Windows. But I’d say just using it is about as complicated as using Windows. You’ll just have to try and see whether you like it. And if it’s hard or easy for you to relearn a few things. I mean if you’re in the Browser and Steam all day, those will be the same applications and also look and work the same way. Other than that you could face some issues with gaming hardware and you have to fiddle with things, or everything works out of the box. You can’t tell beforehand.


  • Maybe Discover isn’t the best choice. I believe that’s made for the KDE desktop and Gnome should come with “Gnome Software” per default?! I’m not entirely sure what kind of concept Fedora has. I usually use the command line or some of the older package managers with more options and settings, so I can’t really tell what’s best here. These modern and shiny ones also regularly confuse me and I install Flatpaks by accident or whatever. Maybe try something else, maybe the Fedora community has some recommendations for a better one.






  • I think that’s a size where it’s a bit more than a good autocomplete. Could be part of a chain for retrieval augmented generation. Maybe some specific tasks. And there are small machine learning models that can do translation or sentiment analysis, though I don’t think those are your regular LLM chatbots… And well, you can ask basic questions and write dialogue. Something like “What is an Alpaca?” will work. But they don’t have much knowledge under 8B parameters and they regularly struggle to apply their knowledge to a given task at smaller sizes. At least that’s my experience. They’ve become way better at smaller sizes during the last year or so. But they’re very limited.

    I’m not sure what you intend to do. If you have some specific thing you’d like an LLM to do, you need to pick the correct one. If you don’t have any use-case… just run an arbitrary one and tinker around?


  • Thanks! I’ve updated the link. I always just use Batocera or something like that, which has Emulationstation and Kodi set up for me. So I don’t pay a lot of attention to the included projects and their development state…

    I didn’t include this, since OP wasn’t mentioning retro-gaming. But Batocera, Recalbox, Lakka, RetroPie are quite nice. I picked one which includes both Kodi and Emulationstation and I can switch between the interfaces with the gamecontroller. I get all the TV and streaming stuff in Kodi, and Emulationstaation launches the games. And I believe it can do Flatpaks and other applications as well.





  • I used to run such things on my NAS/Server at home (And I still do, though I’m currently changing some things.) But in addition to the 4.50€ for ~20W of electricity, it was maybe 600€ for the machine, so another 5€ a month over 10 years. And then my internet contract is a bit more expensive because I need an IPv4 address which can do port forwarding… On the flipside, I can just attach a 10TB harddrive and have it available everywhere. And that’d be very expensive with a cloud service or hoster.


  • Yes. I also have my own small VPS doing this (Piefed), Peertube, eMail, Nextcloud… for myself and family if they want. And that’s $8 a month. I wonder why it doesn’t scale down drastically with more users. I mean sure they generate a lot of requests. But then you only need to cache an image or pull in the posts and replies once for 12.000 users, while my server does that just for me. (Albeit for Lemmy, which is way smaller than Mastodon).