Dune 2. It was the gateway drug that turned me playing computer games into a full blown addiction for a bunch of my family.

Relations camped out waiting for a slot to satisfy the urge for months until they could scrape together the cash to fund an appropriate PC to run it themselves at home.

The three 5.25 inch drives bother me. Most PCs with that sort of aesthetic from the 80s or 90s with a real floppy connector can only run two floppy drives without needing some pretty weird bios and OS config.

AI models produced from copyrighted training data should need a license from the copyright holder to train using their data. This means most of the wild west land grab that is going on will not be legal. In general I’m not a huge fan of the current state of copyright at all, but that would put it on an even business footing with everything else.

I’ve got no idea how to fix the screeds of slop that is polluting search of all kinds now. These sorts of problems ( along the lines of email spam ) seem to be absurdly hard to fix outside of walled gardens.

In New Zealand it is pretty common for members of parliament to get thrown out of the chamber for a whole bunch of reasons. In general you have to do whatever the speaker says, sort of like you would a judge in a court proceeding. There’s a whole lot ( perhaps dated ) rules around treating other members of the house with respect, letting them speak when their part of the process is up etc.

I think most of this is covered by this list of rules: https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/parliamentary-rules/standing-orders-2017-by-chapter/chapter-3-general-procedures/

Who are these mad men who are dumping stuff to SSDs and then sitting them on a shelf? Can’t get my mind around it.

I also like old school single player games often to zone out playing.

Titanfall 2 was good mindless fun, it is like $6NZD on steam, no idea what your currency is.

I bought the Castle wolfenstein reboot games on steam recently in a bundle and that was great fun for the $17NZD.

Also the Halo master chief collection was approximately $25NZD at one point and that was great fun on a dollar per hour basis.

The mass effect games were like $10 at one point too, and the first couple of those are great.

Again, I don’t know much about the xbox pricing on these, they might be still gouging on that platform.

Yeah, I reckon having a split of the frontend and the backend results in about half the complexity in each. If you have multiple frontends you can upgrade whatever the least important one is to see if there are any problems

I didn’t really answer your original question.

When I was using NUC’s I was using Linux mint which uses cinnamon by default as the window manager. Originally I changed it to use some really minimal window manager like twm, but then at some point it became practical to not use one at all and just run kodi directly on X.

If I was going back to a Linux frontend I’d probably evaluate libreELEC as it has alot of the sharp edges sorted out.

I used to run kodi on linux on intel NUC’s connected to all our TV’s a while ago. I don’t remember it being particularly unreliable. The issue that made me change that setup was hardware decoding support in 4k for newer codecs.

What I’ve had doing that frontend function ( kodi, jellyfin, disney plus, netflix etc ) for the last few years is three Nvidia shield TV pro’s which have been absolutely awesome. They are an old product now and I suspect Nvidia are too busy making money to work on a newer generation version of them,

The biggest surprise improvement was how good it was being able to ( easily ) configure their remotes to generate power on / off and volume up and down IR codes for the TV or the AV amp they were using so you only need a single remote.

Separating the function of the backend out from the frontend in the lounge has reduced the broken mess that happens around OS upgrades drastically.

I replaced mythtv with tvheadend on the backend and kodi on the frontend like 5 or 6 years ago.

The setup and configuration at the time on mythtv was slanted towards old ( obsolete ) analog tuners and static setup and tvheadend was like a breath of fresh air in comparison where you could point it at a DVB mux or two and it would mostly do what you want without having to fight it.

I’m not sure how much longer I’ll want something that can tune DVB-S2 and DVB-T though. Jellyfin and friends handle everything other than legacy TV better than kodi these days.

I got a pretty nice Yamaha bluray player that was an appropriate match to my home theatre amp.

Put a bluray in it, got a piracy warning, a few unskippable ads for other movies, an obnoxious excessively drawn out animated menu screen that stuttered like hell and was laggy to use.

Pulled the bluray back out of it, stuck it back in the DVD drawer and proceeded to download a copy of the movie to watch. Been doing that ever since.

The most impressed I’ve been with hardware encoding and decoding is with the built in graphics on my little NUC.

I’m using a NUC10i5FNH which was only barely able to transcode one vaguely decent bitrate stream in software. It looked like passing the hardware transcoding through to a VM was too messy for me so I decided to reinstall linux straight on the hardware.

The hardware encoding and decoding performance was absolutely amazing. I must have opened up about 20 jellyfin windows that were transcoding before I gave up trying and called it good enough. I only really need about 4 maximum.

The graphics on the 10th generation NUC’s is the same sort of thing that is on the 9th gen and 10th gen desktop cpu’s, so if you have and intel cpu with onboard graphics give it a try.

It’s way less trouble than the last time I built a similar setup with NVidia. I haven’t tried a Radeon card yet, but the jellyfin docs are a bit more negative about AMD.

A couple of seagulls made their nest in the cooling vent for the radiator of one of our backup generators. I caught it on our security cameras and mentioned it to management which resulted in folks being dispatched to evict them and clean up the giant pile of sticks and other junk they had dragged in.

Not sure what would have happened next time the thing started, so it was probably for the best. I still felt bad.

Haha, 144p @ 60hz is fricking hilarious.

Reminds me of seeing completely rubbish resolution real player videos embedded in websites back in the late 90s and me thinking, “Well that isn’t ever going to take off”.

I just read the update to the post saying that the issue has been narrowed down to the NTFS driver. I haven’t used NTFS on linux since the NTFS fuse driver was brand new and still wonky as hell something like 15 years ago, so I don’t know much about it.

However, it sounds like the in kernel driver was still pretty fresh in 5.15, so doing as you have suggested and trying out a 6.5 kernel instead is a pretty good call.

If you haven’t already, try running hdparm on your drive to get an idea of if the drives are at least doing large raw reads straight off the disk at an appropriate performance level.

This is output from the little NUC I’m using right now:

# lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2   8:2    0 464.3G  0 part /
└─sda3   8:3    0   976M  0 part [SWAP]

# hdparm -i /dev/sda

/dev/sda:

 Model=Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB, FwRev=RVT02B6Q, SerialNo=S3YANB0KB24583B
...

# hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1526 MB in  3.00 seconds = 508.21 MB/sec

If your results are really poor for this test then it points more at the drive / cable / controller / linux controller driver.

If the results are okay, then the issue is probably something more like a logical partitioning / filesystem driver issue.

I’m not sure what a good benchmark application for Linux that tests the filesystem layer as well is other than bonnie++ which has been around forever. Someone else might have a more current idea of something to use for this.

It might help for the folks here to know which brand and model of SSDs you have, what sort of sata controllers the sata ones are plugged into and what sort of cpu and motherboard the nvme one is connected to.

What I can say is Ubuntu 22.04 doesn’t have some mystery problem with SSDs. I work in a place where we have in the order of 100 Ubuntu 22.04 installs running with SSDs, all either older intel ones or newer samsung ones. They go great.

1988 Nissan Skyline GT with an RB20DET.

It was abandoned by my uncle at our place when he moved overseas and subsequently my sister drove it around a bit. Eventually it leaked coolant from the water pump, overheated and blew a head gasket because she wasn’t paying attention.

I was unemployed and bored and I decided to pull it apart and bought all the bits to fix it. I didn’t really know anything about mechanical stuff at the time, but I am good at logic and try not to be useless at practical stuff even though I’m really a computer geek. I drove it around for a bunch of years after that until I was earning enough money that I could buy something I wanted which was a Mitsubshi EVO 1.

So to answer the question, favorite thing was that I rescued it from oblivion even though I didn’t know much about cars or engines at the time.

The situation is mostly reversed on Linux. Nvidia has fewer features, more bugs and stuff that plain won’t work at all. Even onboard intel graphics is going to be less buggy than a pretty expensive Nvidia card.

I mention that because language model work is pretty niche and so is Linux ( maybe similar sized niches? ).

Please drink a verification can to continue.

The samsung TV that I bought for my son had this annoying overlay thing that pops up when you turn it on that shows all the different inputs and nags about various things it thinks are wrong with the world. It is plugged into an Nvidia shield that we do most things on, but you can’t use the shield until the overlay calms the fuck down and disappears.

It’d be great if you could just have the thing turn on and display an input like our older TVs do.