> The ability to run AI software stacks and apps on this (relatively)
> bleeding edge hardware requires a distribution which is either officially
> supported by the software (Kubuntu LTS) or a community capable of providing
> sufficient unofficial support (everything else).
This is kind of a niche. Only a few of us are in this situation.
For now.
At CES AMD announced a full family of new CPUs in the Ryzen AI MAX family. The hardware will be less niche every day, though not everyone will be tinkering with LLMs.
> Early on I learned that I would have to make tradeoffs between having
> current software and having a stable system. Of the distros above it seemed
> like only Fedora, Kubuntu and CachyOS even had sub-communities that cared
> about my use cases and hardware. In Fedora's case, the existence of said
> community enabled/allowed an update to the "linux-firmware" package to
> break LLM software on my platform and sat on fix for more than three months
> (because I no longer run it I don't even know if that fix has been released yet).
As I understand it, this was a bug contained in an update of the mainline linux-firmware package.
There were actually two unrelated bugs that hit at the same time.
One was related to the linux-firmware package.
The other involves a kernel-ROCm mismatch and requires kernel 6.18.4+ and ROCm 7.2+ (or nightly builds)
If you don't like the latest version of a package, Fedora's dnf has a
subcommand "downgrade" to back out of an upgrade.
I get that, but then Fedora is no more stable than CachyOS. I thought Fedora would be a sweet-spot middle ground between being current and being stable, but not now.
Maybe this is indeed a niche use case, but then I would conclude that Cachy, for all its rolling-release warts, cares more about this niche than Fedora does.
Apparently there is a fixed version upstream (20260110) and Fedora has it. I don't know when it appeared in the update repos, but certainly before Jan 16.
What
pissed me off about Fedora is that they actually had the linux-firmware
fix before the new year but waited three weeks to roll out.
What is your favourite PC repair tool? I'm annoyed that GPARTED cannot grow a 100G ESP since that uses an usupported FAT variant. At least on one of my computers. The obvious but inelegant work-around is to create a
new, larger, ESP, copy the old ESP's contents to it, and then delete the old ESP.
It boots a legal, stripped-down version of Windows that includes a bunch of tools including multiple different partition apps.
The app I use is AOMEI Partition Assistant (free edition). It's great at not only resizing but also moving partitions as needed.
I've used it with ntfs and ext4. No idea if it supports resizing btrfs. In my case, since I was reformatting the root partition immediately after repartitioning, it didn't matter to me.
Worst case: redo the Windows partitions with AOMEI and the Linux ones with gparted.