I swap PCs regularly and I hate how long it takes to install windows.

Also windows borked a games drive once and I never forgave it.

Then I learned all the privacy stuff.

I’ve got a virtualized set up to.

Its pretty unbothered being virtualized so long as the disks are passed through. In my set up, I have the SAS board passed through and its using that.

My reasoning is that I wanted a lot of disks space, but I couldn’t get that without just a big case in general, so I use the extra space to store GPUs for AI and encoding stuff

I’m probably just stupid.

Yeah that’s what’s going to happen with the main blog.

Forgejo action > static HTML site > Cloudflared tunnel

This separate idea is to have a Lemmy instance to host pictures and federate the blogs comment system so people ideally won’t have to sign in or make an account to comment.

FreeCAD isn’t terrible if you haven’t already learned F360

I had to watch a bunch of videos on FreeCAD to sorta unlearn the work flow of F360 stuff but its not bad.

There’s a few options now, but you can get Intel N100 ITX boards Like this one from ASUS with a soldered on N100 CPU for the cost of a normal motherboard.

If its just a NAS, and I do recommend having a separate Just a NAS, that CPU fucks hard.

Oh man, Teams +Outlook + Office 365 + onedrive +Copilot?

So good for office shit. So bad for hood practices.

“Hey copilot I’m pretty sure I got an email asking if I had an SOP on X. Can you find that email and the SOP?”

“Copilot, using the recording of the teams meeting ‘Training from Vendor X’ and my notes on ‘Tool Y’ can you compile that into a FAQ sheet for us?”

Sure it misses stuff and is only so good because none of the data is private, but man that’s 90% of my work load for SOP making. Worth the $400 a year corporate pays for it.

And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.

Actually ASUS started to sell N100 motherboards with the CPU soldered on for $120

That plus a jonsbo N2 or N3, a few extra pieces, and its a few hundred dollars cheaper than the Ugreen options. Sure it will probably run Truenas instead of Ugreens custom truenas or whatever its built on, but that extra $300 is another 24TB hard drive or a HexOS lifetime subscription.

There’s also always the classic buy an old mid sized tower for $100 and slap two massive hard drives in it

Imagine less off a proper BOD and more of a 3D Printable holder for 3.5 inch drives and no actual connections.

I was considering a mini ITX PC with just an external SAS to Sata PCI card. But at the rate of just building that I might end up just building a better tiny nas box with maybe a jonsbo case like the N3

That’s basically what I’m going for.

How are you connecting the mini PC via SATA and how are you powering the BOD?

Do you fear technology

Oh yes! Greatly!

Windows

Ah, a different kind of fear was meant…

A 4060ti has been out long enough that you’re fine with basically any main stream distro.

I think even the 50 series is fine now with most mainstream distros as well.

I still prefer arch based distros now for Nvidia cards and honestly, Fedora is great!

I usually follow the craft computing video whenever I have to set it up. He has a document in the description with all the things you might need to passthrough a GPU but only like half are needed to passthrough an HBA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hOBAGKLQkI

Proxmox wiki has a more concise guide IMO

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough

It was really simple to do in Proxmox.

You will find no name brand HBAs in IT mode on eBay for half the price of Intel, Supermicro, Dell, Etc branded ones. Do not buy the no names. I spent a week flashing and reflashing some cheap one, cycling through cables, etc. Nothing.

My supermicro branded one worked absolutely no issue. And I think it was like $40

It probably took a total of 30 minutes to pass it through and build the VM and everything. It took a couple days to rebuild my data from my previous truenas server but I had 10 TB of data on 4 drives.

The only issues I’ve had have been my own reading comprehension in setting up truenas accounts.

Are you using truenas as the entire homelab?

I also love messing with stuff until it breaks and I learn something, but I’ve decided I just want my files to be accessible.

So I actually have truenas virtualized with a passed through HBA so I can run proxmox to host all my breakable VMs while leaving truenas alone.

Dell Optiplex 3050

Lenovo m720

HP whatever with a 7th gen Intel

All can be had for $50 ish

A Microsoft glazing botnet leveraging copilot and all of r/linuxsucks training data to shitpost on Lemmy made by a developer who took a Janatorial job at Microsoft to “get his foot in the door” during an internal hackathon he was accidentally invited to.

From what I understand its not as fast as a consumer Nvdia card but but close.

And you can have much more “Vram” because they do unified memory. I think the max is 75% of total system memory goes to the GPU. So a top spec Mac mini M4 Pro with 48GB of Ram would have 32gb dedicated to GPU/NPU tasks for $2000

Compare that to JUST a 5090 32GB for $2000 MSRP and its pretty compelling.

$200 and its the 64GB model with 2x 4090’s amounts of Vram.

Its certainly better than the AMD AI experience and its the best price for getting into AI stuff so says nerds with more money and experience than me.

From what I understand its not as fast as a consumer Nvdia card but but close.

And you can have much more “Vram” because they do unified memory. I think the max is 75% of total system memory goes to the GPU. So a top spec Mac mini M4 Pro with 48GB of Ram would have 32gb dedicated to GPU/NPU tasks for $2000

Compare that to JUST a 5090 32GB for $2000 MSRP and its pretty compelling.

$200 and its the 64GB model with 2x 4090’s amounts of Vram.

Its certainly better than the AMD AI experience and its the best price for getting into AI stuff so says nerds with more money and experience than me.

Honestly if you’re not gaming or playing with new hardware, there is absolutely no point.

I’ve considered swapping this computer over to Fedora for a hot minute, but it really is a gaming PC and I should stop trying to break it.