I’ve made the same decision - it was much easier when I saw the state of party size/private games

It’s deck certified, but yeah. Apparently the denuvo issue here is that you only get 5 activations, so don’t muck about too much with changing which proton version you’re using.

I have a mini PC server that can’t be physically locked away from people in the house, because I do not have the ability or space to install a rack and physically secure it.

There is a housekeeper that is sometimes not the same person.

There is a curious child in the house.

The server needs to be rebooted remotely occasionally.

Some disks are removable.

I am not concerned about an APT posing as my maid to steal the key from RAM. It’s not part of my threat model.

I do want to know if my UEFI, bootloader or UKI has been fucked with without my knowledge.

I generally find writing a good role takes longer than doing it manually. Especially as you have to keep testing failure conditions as you think of them.

However, the point is, that once you’re finished with the role, you never have to do that process again.

Not if you want to rebuild Not if you want to migrate to a new os Not if you build a second server Not if you move to a newcloud hosting provider

Porting to a new OS or after an update that changes how the software works is about as fast as doing it manually

Maybe it’s only one server today, but how many times would you need to rebuild it over the running lifetime?

The killer feature is that having something like ansible lets you kill your darlings, and keep servers aa cattle, not pets.

Manual setup chops isn’t a different skill here. I view ansible as a combination setup and documentation. If you’re going to figure out how, why not write down how you did it? If you’re going to write it down complete with code lines to run, why not script it?

I was going to add that the avatar was already dead, and it was your screaming the troll was talking over, because this is the 30th time you’d heard the ad

It’s your 30th boss run. As you fuck up your sixth dodge roll in a row, the Troll picks up your character. He roars over the screams of your avatar as he crushes it’s ribs in its massive fist.

Then, as he raises you high over head, and opens wide to chomp down on your head, the actions stops. The Troll turns to the camera and smiles, showing off brilliant pearly whites. “Colgate is recommended by 9/10 dentists.”, the troll effuses over the screaming.

A text box appears.

‘To proceed, type the number of dentists Colgate is recommended by, followed by this random number “N”.’

If you want to approach 200Hz, then it’s probably still good advice to go for the XTX, especially if high framerate is a strong feel-good improvement for you.

I’ve got a 2k 240Hz monitor, I can drop it to 1080p for testing if you want me to try any specific games out. If I’ve got it, I can give you some rough FPS numbers - just let me know! I’m running steam on Linux with proton, but the numbers should be pretty comparable to Windows these days.

Love an ITX build - I’m cheating with the XTIA XProto L because it’s an open build. I was lucky the 7900XT fit on mine - it’s almost too long. The MERC 310 XFX 7900XT and XTX are both 344mm. It dwarfs my old RTX2070.

They are technically PCIe 4.0 cards. My i7-10700K CPU is only 3.0 capable, but it runs just fine. Some people reported problems using 4.0 cards in 3.0 slots. I haven’t seen issues. I’m told I’m leaving some power on the table, but with the price of RAM, I’m not upgrading any time soon.

One other note, the additional power supply connections required for the GPUs are 2x8 pin connectors for the 7900XT and 3x8 pin connectors for the 7900XTX, so you may need to buy a new power supply or double check your power supply came with enough ports and cables if it’s modular.

I got a 7900xt and I’m very happy with it!

I wish I’d spent $100 more at the time and got the XTX. I just want that little bit extra in some games, where it might make 4k (medium) hit 80fps stable instead of 60fps. Or 2k (high) hit 120fps instead of 100.

I will say, I got an XFX card and man are they long. Deffo check your case!

I’ve seen the recommendations of software raid0. The answers are all technically correct.

Don’t do this. Especially with real hardware. If you lose one drive, you will lose both the drives.

Could you give us more info on how your other encrypted drive is mounted and meant to be used?

• It is possible to get the second encrypted drive to decrypt and mount automatically, without logging in.
• It’s possible to do it without leaving a key for your second drive on your primary hard drive using a TPM
• It is possible to get both drives to decrypt automatically and mount

It all depends how the encryption is being done, and where the mount points are.

Could you give us:

• The rough dimensions of the drive partitions (fdisk -l)
• Your current mount points after mounting the second drive (df -h)

The trouble is the bootloader is often not relockable with a custom avb key

The only OEM with official support for relocking the boot loader with a custom avb key is Google sadly

Preinstalled OS is useable, though you’ll want to update it.

Installing the updated OS on an SD card is easy enough. I haven’t tried flashing it to disk yet. I’ve not felt hampered by major performance penalties.

The WiFi dongle workaround is that simple, yes. Pick one that’s supported in the mainline kernel, and you’re off to the races.

Be aware, you’ll need to pick one that’s USB C if you don’t want a second converter attached.

My preference would be to tether my phone I think - but my USB C 2.5G Ethernet adapter worked pretty well too.

Some more presient info from my investigation:

I got the latest Danctnix 20260630 running on it, and it’s working better now. Suspend is unmasked in that version, but it is not working all the time.

The WiFi driver is still unstable, but you can disconnect/reconnect quick enough when it drifts off.

Running phosh and sxmo/sway was a fair bit faster than full KDE.

The primary problem is hardware acceleration. For video, it’s just not there yet. You can make some video formats work, but this SoC is limited in what it can do in hardware, on its VPU. What little can be done, isn’t available without compiling your own ffmpeg.

This link shows what can be done with the 3566 hardware:

https://pine64.org/documentation/General/Mainline_Hardware_Decoding/

This link shows how it can be done:

https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2023/09-17-hardware-accelerated-playback-on-pinetab2.gmi

The bottom line is, without hardware acceleration for video decoding, it feels very underpowered.

I did bother to set it all up, and it’s a damn competent little tablet when you do - but all your effort won’t apply to streamed video unless you use MPV or something to play it, to take advantage of the ffmpeg. Straight up Firefox and chromium don’t offer selectors for YouTube etc to pick the right encoding format for your CPU, and they typically use more modern encoding formats. (e.g. VP9 over VP8)

Also, battery life is great! I’m sure not playing video helps…

Very much dependent on the particular hardware - here, the pinetab2 has some support. The danctnix mobile linux community maintains builds for it, so it’s a subset of Arch on Arm.

https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/danctnix-packages/tree/main/pine64/device-pine64-pinetab2

outside of that, there’s some limited support for postmarketOS and mobian

A good place to start understanding the challenges you’d face would be on the wiki:

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTab2_Releases

I just bought one. The default KDE is a bit heavyweight for it, I’m thinking something lighter might be better.

I would say that they perfectly nailed the description, this is not a beginner device. You’ll not be distrohopping without knowing how to patch your own WiFi drivers and fix the auto rotate (90° clockwise further than it should be out of the box).

I love it, really cool. But not an easy in for beginners.

Feel free to ask me questions or check something, or send a picture of something!

I replaced an NVMe drive on a Windows 11 machine the other day. Cloned to new disk, booted up. After posting and entering the bootloaders, it said “BOOT DRIVE INACCESSIBLE”. The drive needed a driver to BOOT once Windows took over.

A Western Digital 850x black 2TB. This is not an uncommon drive, but I had to patch in the driver to the disk from a live CD.

I don’t see how people put up with this crap.

Sorry, not sure I understand about repeatability.

I don’t own one, that was just what I’ve seen about the chipset, LPCAMM2 memory and checking the stats on the pages.

I’d really like one though!

It’s roughly the same package as the middle power choice for framework, so similar.

Battery is very similar, so’s the GPU and RAM. Only big difference is the screen, which framework nailed.

The framework 13 is almost a full lbs heavier than the 14 inch lemur pro.

FYI, scrcpy can be an excellent tool for remote support, but you’d better trust the network the interface is on

It’s going to help me when mine arrives next week!

Breeze white, left on laptops. I use the track pad left-handed. Always freaks people out when the cursor is reversed and I’m used to it now.

Also, if you’re trying to click on the first half of a letter to highlight (and the cursor doesn’t switch to the beam), I find it easier when you can see more of the letter.

I would dearly love to know how many if statements are between me and the brakes.

Also, being able to prove that that the CAN bus and RTOS system was air-gapped from whatever bullshit uplink to the internet ends up in there would be worth ~20K extra to me.