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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 14th, 2026

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  • With the caveat that I last played with Gentoo 20 years ago… I am almost certainly a bit out of date.

    If I remember correctly it, it explicitly recommended that you use at least the minimal gentoo live disk to get your system into a running state. You’d be working from the live cd for the first couple of sections before booting into a very basic install on your hard disk. From there you would compile the rest of your system.

    Even the minimal disk provides all of the tools that you need to bootstrap the system. Sources for everything else are downloaded as they are needed. Come to think of it, I think the full desktop live dvd was fairly new at that time, in it’s first or second release.

    Even at that time the Gentoo manual was incredibly well written and is in my opinion the gold standard for how user documentation should be written. I had been toying with linux for about 3 months at that point and was able to get a working desktop system up and running in about a month , mostly just waiting for things to compile on the slow processors we had back then. I would run a few commands and then go off and do something else for a few hours. rinse and repeat.


  • Linux has run on ARM procs for some time. Software is a little hit or miss, but most things have a compiled build for it at this point. A lot of the big servers are running ARM processors due to potential power savings.

    The popularity of the Raspberry Pi really increased the number of projects with ARM builds as well. It’s been possible to run a pretty decent desktop stack for 10 or 15 years. When the Pi2B came out.

    If you happen to run across a project that is not available on ARM you might give a go at compiling it yourself. About half of the time it’s not too difficult and a good beginner project.





  • Meh. Reminds me a bit of the kerflufel when SystemD came out and largely replaced the V init system that came before. A whole bunch of religious adjacent arguments, at high volume with not much intelligence or understanding. It’ll pass.

    All I need to know is does it solve a problem I have, does it work, is it stable, and is it secure.

    Only warning I’ll give is that you should probably not get too used to your off site LLM models (Claude, GPT or whatever you’re using). Pricing seems unsustainable and the hype makes it feel like a bubble similar to the dot com bubble.

    Might want to devote some time to trying to bring your LLM usage in-house. There is no telling who will survive the crash and it’s not always the “best” one.




  • My wife preordered the new Flashforge printer (Creator 5). Still waiting for it to come in, but early reviews look interesting.

    4 head tool changer design. It’s a little over your budget, ($699 USD currently) and they don’t seem very linux friendly, but it does seem to be compatible with orca slicer. Don’t seem to be as bad as Bamboo though.

    Downside is you have to wait for it to ship. They seem to have had some sort of shipping snafu and preorders have gotten delayed. Looks like we’ll be getting ours sometime end of June. Not sure when regular orders will ship.

    A couple of years ago, I had an Ender 5. Can’t recommend it. Went through 3 main boards before I decided to start modding it. Never did get it truly reliable.









  • The only prebuilts or kits I recommend currently are from Prusa. Fairly open and they have a strong track record for reliability.

    If you’re willing to build, you might take a look at the Voron project. I hear good things about them, though reliability is largely up to your mechanical and electronics skills. I believe one or two of their builds are roughly in your price range.

    That said, my wife recently surprised me by preordering the Flashforge Creator 5 Pro (Not really in your price range) as a gift. They seem to have a fairly solid track record for reliability, though they are not much better than Bamboo in terms of openness. They have other printers and I’ve heard mostly good things about their AD5X and Adventure 5M Pro which are more in line with your budget.


  • Until about a year ago, I was just using Jellyfin for all of my media. For music I was using the phone app FinAmp.

    I set up Navidrome when I ran into a bug that made music playback unreliable. Jellyfin fixed the bug and it’s back to being rock solid, but I still mostly use Navidrome for music.

    Honestly I think the only reason why I stuck with Navidrome is that it has better playlist support. Building playlists still sucks but it sucks a little less in Navidrom as it can actually import playlists made elsewhere. Other than that, Navidrome has a better web interface for music.


  • I tend not to sail the Sea’s very often. I generally prefer to buy the albums or borrow them from my friends or the local library, rip them to Flac and then stream them to my phone using either Jellyfin or Navidrome. When I just want a radio station, I’ll open up Spotify. Many years ago, I had a collection of online radio stations I’d listen to, but over time they either closed their public streams and required an dedicated app or died off completely.

    On your data bandwidth issue, both Jellyfin and Navidrome support on demand transcoding and can stream any bitrate you might want. There are options for it both in the web app and in most of the phone clients I’ve run across. I generally have my phone apps set to 96k MP3 as I can’t really hear a difference most of the time, at least not with the headphones I have in combo with the background noise that is generally around me and my preexisting hearing damage. Most folks can’t tell a difference between CD’s and a 128k mp3.

    As for torrenting, I can say that you will probably want a paid VPN running AND active any time your torrent software is running. Beyond that I would recommend you check out !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com for more information.