From: Evan Leibovitch via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
Some people here may have been informed, some entertained, and others may applaud themselves by having avoided my distribution hopping of the last half-year.
I'm informed. Thanks!
Pretty well the only thing these distros had in common was KDE, a must-have in this search. (There's enough to learn about each distro, I don't need to keep relearning a GUI.)
Agreed, but I use GNOME for the same reason.
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.
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. This isn't a Fedora issue, other than the fact that Fedora tracks upstream faster than most distros. 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 am guessing that the problem is as described here: <https://www.hardware-corner.net/strix-halo-rocm-firmware-fix/> 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. This is all easy IF you know that the problem is isolated to the linux-firmware package. I only know that because you told me.
So then I tried again to install CachyOS and discovered why my first attempt had failed. CachyOS has a very unique install-time quirk -- the EFI partition. This is a FAT32-formatted chunk of your storage that is normally mounted under /boot/efi and has to be at least 100MB (maybe 200MB if you're dual-booting with Windows or want to have multiple boot options). *CachyOS won't let you install without an EFI partition of at least 2GB*. This is fine if you're starting with a fresh drive, but will likely require manual resizing (and maybe movement) of partitions if you want to dual-boot or have anything previous that you want to keep. So I rebooted into my favourite PC repair tool, repartitioned so that my EFI area is now 4GB, and CachyOS is finally happy to install. I understand that all this space is needed to accommodate btrfs snapshots into which you may want to boot if you need to rollback due to an update breaking things. In hindsight maybe Fedora -- which also likes btrfs for its filesystems -- would have benefitted from this too.
As I mentioned before, there seems to be a move to able to boot kernels from the ESP. That requires more space too. 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.
If there's interest I'll report back on how well the AI and games work once installed as well as any hiccups in day-to-day use.
Yes, please!
PS: Yes I know that Kubuntu LTS 26.04 is coming up in April and will refresh its app releases. It might even ship with kernel 6.20 which doesn't exist yet. But then it will be frozen in time for another two years. Don't want that, not on new hardware whose features have not been fully exploited yet.
The reason I gave up on CentOS / RHEL is that it's product cycle was even slower. Each version upgrade was quite disruptive. Normally, two years isn't bad (Ubuntu LTS). It just doesn't work for AI where everything changes quickly. But for me Fedora's cycle (6 months) seems OK for most things I actually do.