On Fri, Jul 4, 2025 at 10:32 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk < talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
In the past, "official" support has been for RHEL and Ubuntu LTS. Vendors of kludgy stuff (not open source) wanted platform stability. That's not a phrase that I'd use to describe Fedora.
The AI world is moving faster than even Fedora, so that's less of a factor here.
I like the open source purity of Fedora but sometimes that is
uncomfortable -- much less these days.
That's exactly the same reaction I had to Debian when I tried it some years ago. I don't have an option; I have some bleeding-edge hardware that *needs* the proprietary drivers.
You had a choice: you could have not used that hardware (sending a message through the marketplace), or use that hardware on a dedicated machine.
Well, it's a choice, but I believe a safe one for the longer term though a pain in the short term. I intend to keep this box for a while, and what's bleeding edge today will be legacy before I can blink. FWIW, it's based on the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395. Dumb name but quite the capability. I can assign 96GB to GPU memory which should let me run some interesting LLMs locally. It's probably a little slower than an RTX 5090, but that maxes out at 32GB and the GPU card costs more than my entire system. It's new enough that AMD is about to roll out ROCm for this architecture Real Soon Now. I'm confident they will since obviously they have a big stake in maximizing this chip's performance. And, yes, in a sense, I *did* want to send a message through the marketplace. AMD (for which I still have some sentiment because of ATI) should be encouraged to produce systems like this, which come close to the specs of the Nvidia DIGITS box (now called the DGX Spark) at substantially less cost. IMO Nvidia is treating its non-industrial customers like shit these days, and this is my way of saying with my choice that such arrogance has a cost. And if it means that I need to use the proprietary-driver kludge until the open source driver catches up, I can live with that. The relevance here is that this choice at least partially determines my choice of distro.
And, much as I utterly despise them, I have external needs that demand I
have proprietary chat apps.
You could use that chat app in a virtual machine (Android or Windows, I guess). Bonus: that would sandbox the app.
So do flatpaks, which is how most of them ship these days.
I applaud any project that really really really wants to keep their own
stuff FOSS. But I draw the line between encouraging users to choose FOSS and being an obstacle to the proprietary stuff. By all means suggest IRC as an alternative to Whatsapp but don' t try to FORCE me down that path.
You are reading that the wrong way. It's Whatsapp that is doing the forcing, not the distro.
They choose not to open source, I have no say in that decision. I have a choice not to use it but I am unwilling to forego the global connectivity that such apps offer. The people with whom I can communicate are forcing my hand and that's not going to change anytime soon. Or, as you did for a while, run Windows on your desktop with an enclave for
Linux when useful.
Indeed I did. But I've been researching and found that Windows Subsystem for Linux is sub-optimal for AI tasks -- especially on AMD. - Evan