Yup, they say its free and open source, and here is the link to their github:

https://github.com/RPTools

Me personally, I really liked using maptool. https://www.rptools.net/toolbox/maptool/

Its got a bit of a learning curve and doesnt look great, but it gets the job done and is Foss.

I like the elitedesk PC for smaller services. My main reason being the power draw and or heat output. The ones I have and plan to use 60w of power which is pretty damn good for a whole computer.

Noise is another factor. Space saving is a plus, helps prevent ewaste since these are almost always refurbished. Its a good deal IMO.

And you can always buy or build a big honking PC or server for something else later on.

Learning Linux can be difficult man. Even after using Linux as my daily driver for a couple years, I still feel like I know nothing man.

Real talk, start with dead simple stuff and go from there. Install a package from a package manager, update your system, make a file with terminal.

You dont have to be a wizzard man, docker shit is still over my head.

I don’t have many Linux friendly plugins that i can share unfortunately. When I tried running reaper on Linux, most things I tried either didn’t run at all or crashed.

Best I had working was decent sampler. And even that didn’t work great for me:

https://www.decentsamples.com/product/decent-sampler-plugin/

Really cool project though, and lots of fun instruments to try on pianobook.

Tldr, I recommend sticking with Windows or using two separate machines, one for music production running Windows, the other for running everything else with Linux.

Music production isnt great on Linux in my experience at least right now. If you use any paid plugins that are windows only, there’s a good chance they won’t run. I haven’t used ableton or cakewalk but I use reaper which has a native Linux version, and even that had a lot of issues. Anything with ilok is a no go, even plugins that dont, I had a hard time getting working or if they did work, they crashed A LOT.

Gaming and other general use has been fine for me, ive even done video and photo editing on Linux and been happy with it.

If you want the easiest experience, I typically recommend Fedora KDE spin or kubuntu. KDE is a desktop environment that is very similar to windows and highly customizable. You’d likely feel at home on it. Immutable distro might also be a good option if you really want the “IDC just do the update” path. Harder to break, easier to manage from what ive heard but I haven’t used them personally so maybe others that have can chime in.

I made a windows only box for music production and use Linux on my main PC. It runs windows 10 and is rarely connected to the internet except when I need it to be. If you wanna run Linux and make music, it can be done, but I had a terrible time with it and have given up for now.

So make a separate machine for music production and run Linux on your main pc or just run Windows is my advice. So far, this has been the best setup for me. I don’t worry about my privacy, I can make music when I want, and I don’t have to worry about incompatible plugins, crashes, stupid nonsense that gets in my way when i wanna make music.

Thats rad, thanks for the info. I may follow suit, been trying to degoogle myself lately.

Yea I’m aware but I appreciate the insight :) so far my local ai experience has been lack luster so I’m hoping that training and RAG will make up for the context size at least a little. Ifnit can answer accurately in the first place, it may not need as big of a context window.

If you haven’t tried using RAG in some form, I would recommend giving it a go. Its pretty cool stuff, helps make models answer more accurately based on the documentation you give them though in my case, ive had limited success. Tbh, chatgpt has become my last resort when I just wanna get something done but I don’t like using it due to the privacy concerns, not to mention the ethical issues I have with ai training in general from big tech.

How is searxng BTW? Would you say its good to host or do you use a normal search engine more often? Or do you just use it for the AI search plugin?

Ive actually been thinking about using it rather than duckduckgo but was also hopeful the search index they are working on would be enough to satisfy my needs, or that a self hosted AI enabled search engine would work well enough when I need it.

Thats why i was considering training my own model if possible. Ive been toying around with kobold.CPP and gpt4all which both have RAG implementations.

My idea is to essentially chat with documentation and as a separate use case, have it potentially be a AI search engine but locally hosted. I do still prefer to search myself, but fuck man, searches have gotten so bad, and the kobold.CPP web lookup feature was pretty neat IMO.

So yea you’re not wrong, I’m just hoping that if in train it and or give it documentation it can reference when answering, it will be suitable. Mostly AI has been good for me as kind of a rubber ducky when troubleshooting and helping me search for things when I have some specific question and in don’t want “top 5 things vaguely related to your question” results.

Getting ready to move from out of the woods and back to civilization with my partner.

Not looking forward to having neighbors above or below me but I’m very excited to have internet that doesnt fucking suck.

Once were moved and a bit more settled, I’m gonna start really digging into to selfhosting things. I have the hardware, a couple HP mini PCs that will run home assistant and probably a server for various docker things. Nextcloud and immich seem to be the things I’ve found i wanna use so far. I already have a NAS set up, but was having am issue with it not booting if a monitor isnt plugged in. I bought a dummy plug for it but haven’t tried it out yet.

Will also be setting up an AI server for local LLM use. Hope to train one to fit my needs once I pull the trigger on 3060 12GB card but need to figure out what other parts I’ll use. Might upgrade my main rig and use the parts from that, or maybe I’ll buy a old dell and fix it up. Not sure yet.

Lots of ideas, so little time lol.

I don’t disagree that snaps aren’t the best thing but Ubuntu does allow you to turn off auto updates now if you want and although it took a little extra setup, I also use the .deb version of Firefox right now. It works well. I’m running Kubuntu 24.04.

For servers especially, Ubuntu can be a really good option. I’ve heard some people actually like snaps for servers because the auto update so its one less this to worry about. Yea you can setup a script to do that too but its a nice to have for some folks.

All that said, its not for everyone, but for servers I think Ubuntu is a good option just for compatibility alone, not to mention the documentation, tutorials, etc.

Thats just my opinion though.

Man where was this post when in was DMing? lol.

This is super cool though. Rn I’m doing some film editing work for my friend, and this could probably be useful for subtitles too. Thanks for sharing.

I agree. I tried Fedora first, then Pop!OS, and then settled on Kubuntu.

Kubuntu has been the most stable so far, no big issues. I chose it for that and its Wayland support. Snaps can be disabled or even have auto update turned off which is what I did and I had no real issues with Ubuntu past that so overall a good distro.

Widely supported, plenty of tutorials, has my favorite DE as a spin, it just does what I need it to.

Yea not super thrilled with bambu lab for the privacy concerns but the printer itself is good. I just use it in lan only mode and block any outgoing network traffic on my router.

But there are other brands that are good. Ive heard prusa is nice but never tried them.

I found this very entertaining lol. And it also confirms I made the right choice not using Nix as my daily driver. This sounds like a headache.

KDE connect can be good too but I like localsend for sharing files with any and all devices like when I’m moving phones and need to send a file to the new one or between my PCs. You’re not wrong though, KDE connect works well for fileshare too.

Localsend is rad, super useful: https://localsend.org/

Send any file across different devices over the network. FOSS and fast. Highly recommend.

EW

ᴵ ᵃˡˢᵒ ᵘˢᵉ ᵁᵇᵘⁿᵗᵘ ᵇᵘᵗ ᵗʰᵉ ᴷᴰᴱ ᶠˡᵃᵛᵒʳ. ᴺᵒ ʲᵘᵈᵍᵐᵉⁿᵗ, ʲᵘˢᵗ ᵐᵉᵐᵉᶦⁿᵍ

Anything to help a fellow Linux user my dude. I’m not as skilled as some of the other folks on here but I try when I can.

I think I saw someone mention hyperland which may be up your alley but you also mentioned you’d like to stay away from Arch so not sure if that’d work in this case.

KDE has changed quite a bit, you might like it better now. I think the recent changes have been good but I guess I dont change it as much as you might want.

TL:DR, Kubuntu or Fedora with KDE

Everyone will have their own opinions on this. Just speaking for overall desktop environments, KDE is my top pick. Pretty easy to pick up and change. Works well, feels like Windows but actually good and very customizable. And extensible.

As for the distro behind it, pick your poison. I think either Fedora or Ubuntu. KDE spin would be Kubuntu which is what I currently use. Both are pretty popular and supported well.

Some people dont really care for Ubuntu but coming from Fedora with KDE, its been a much smoother experience personally. Yes, I’m not a fan of snaps, but they can be turned off. In all, I’m using Linux, I’m much better off on Ubuntu than Windows privacy and security wise which are the main things I care about aside from being able to change whatever I god damn please.

I struggle less with shit not working on kubuntu. Fedora for the most part was very solid but there were more than a few times Steam for whatever reason gave me issues on Fedora. I’d consider steam a pretty easy thing to install and use but I had lots of issues with it just not starting or crashing, hanging when downloading updates. Really annoying.

Could be im just better at using linux now than I was back then as Fedora with KDE was my first real jump to Linux from Windows.