d3Xt3r

What are corporate users using?

Corporates are using ThinkPads, HP EliteBooks and MacBooks. OS being Windows, macOS mainly. Linux on workstations is pretty rare - mainly used by developers - and the distro being Ububtu LTS (which I do not recommend).

Since you want to use Linux, go for a ThinkPad. There are more Linux-friendly laptops of course (like Framework and System76) but I believe none of them offer corporate-levels of stability and build-quality like ThinkPads yet - as you have experienced yourself with System76.

Main pro-tip is to avoid systems that use nVidia cards - they're often responsible for buggy suspend/resume in Linux, and can break your OS sometimes when you do an OS/kernel upgrade. So if you're after stability, avoid nVidia like the plague.

For the docking station, I've had good experiences with the HP Thunderbolt Dock G4. The initial releases were in fact a bit buggy with suspend/resume, but HP have released subsequent firmware updates to fix those issues. In fact, HP have been really good at providing regular firmware updates for those docks, and the best part is that it's on the LVFS too - which means the firmware can be updated directly in Linux using fwupd. A lot of vendors don't bother updating docking stations - and even fewer update them via LVFS, so this is something you might definitely want to look into.

Finally, for distro recommendations, I would recommend a Fedora Atomic distro since they're immutable, and rollbacks are as easy as just selecting the previous image in the boot menu. Given your requirements, I'd recommed Bluefin - specifically the Developer Experience version, since it comes with virtualisation tools OOTB.

For reference, I mainly use Bazzite (another variant of Fedora Atomic) on my pure-AMD ThinkPad Z13, and haven't had any issues with suspend/resume, external monitors, or virtualisation dev/test workflows. There's virtually no overnight battery drain either when suspending. My system also supports Opal2, so my drive is encrypted transparently to the OS, with virtually no performance overhead. It's also nice not having to muck around with LUKS and the complexities around it. I use this system for both work and personal use (gaming), and it's been a great experience so far - both software and hardware. Happy to answer any questions you may have.

There's also XFCE and LXQt, if you want simple, easy-to-use environments.

My elderly, non-techy mum has been using XFCE over a decade across three different distros (Mint, Xubuntu, Zorin) and her experience has been consistent all these years, with no major issues or complaints. If my mum can use Linux just fine - so can anyone else (who don't have any specific/complex hw/sw requirements that is). I don't see how much further intuitive it needs to get.

KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXQt etc all have their own place and audience. There's no need to have one experience for all - in fact, that would be a huge detriment, because you can never satisfy everyone with a one-size-fits-all approach. Take a look at Windows itself as an example - the abomination that was the Start Menu in Windows 8 (and the lack of the start button) angered so many, to the point that Microsoft had to backtrack some of those design decisions. Then there was the convoluted mess of Metro and Win32 design elements in Win 10, and finally the divisive new taskbar in Win11... you're never going to make everyone happy. And this is where Linux shines - all the different DEs and WMs offer a UX that suits a different audience or requirements. And we should continue to foster and encourage the development of these environments. Linux doesn't need to be like Windows.

I'm not sure who this Chris Titus is, but I can't believe there's no mention of Bazzite in that infographic, which is surprising because it's arguably the best distro for gaming right now (and a pretty decent newbie-friendly distro too). It's also surprising there's no mention of CachyOS, which is overall the best performing easy-to-install Linux distro right now (although since it's based on Arch, I wouldn't recommend it for newbies).

So if I were you, I wouldn't put too much faith in their video when they missed out on these two (and several other cool distros such as Bluefin, SecureBlue, AntiX etc).

In saying that, nVidia on Linux sucks in general, so I second @[email protected]'s suggestion and recommend getting an AMD instead - it's so much more nicer and hassle-free, not having to deal with any proprietary driver bs, and having a smooth Wayland experience.

What @lemmyreader said, except this is XFCE installed directly on Termux (and accessed via Termux-X11, a native X server for Android). No *buntu involved here. If you have an Android as well, you can set all this up (minus the actual Chicago95 theme) using this script.

And here's a screenshot of Dillo (and some other apps) running on a modern Samsung phone (Galaxy Fold 4) :)

Nice, great to see the continued development of an old-school, lightweight browser. We need more active alternatives to the bloated duopoly.

Check out bamboo pillows and pillow cases, they have natural hypoallergenic properties and it might suit you better. Or you could just get a bamboo pillow protector + pillow case, in case you don't want to change your whole pillow out.

1. I used OneDrive, and especially the file on-demand (all files on server visible in explorer but only downloaded when needed) feature a lot

You can continue to use OneDrive. I use the OneDriver client and it works really well - your drive appears just like a local drive, but files only get downloaded when you try to access them. Once downloaded, it gets cached locally and is available offline, and is kept in sync automatically. Other cloud providers should have similar FUSE clients available.

2. What are best practices for managing apps?

Best practice is to stick to packages provided by your distro's repos. Flatpak should be your second option if you can't find your app there, and AppImages should be your third option (since Flatpaks are superior as they can share dependencies, unlike AppImages). Avoid Snap. In fact, avoid any distros that even use Snap (*buntu). Also, if you're on a Debian/Ububtu based distro, avoid adding PPAs (thirdparty user repositories) as far as possible, as these can cause dependency issues and may cause pain when you upgrade your distro.

Is there a GUI (I know) way to see all applications

That should be provided by your distro - Gnome-based ones have "Software" and KDE-based ones have "Discover".

Since you're on Linux, it's just a matter of installing the right packages from your distros package manager. Lots of articles on the Web, just google your app + "ROCm". Main thing you gotta keep in mind is the version dependencies, since ROCm 6.0/6.1 was released recently, some programs may not yet have been updated for it. So if your distro packages the most recent version, your app might not yet support it.

This is why many ML apps also come as a Docker image with specific versions of libraries bundled with them - so that could be an easier option for you, instead of manually hunting around for various package dependencies.

Also, chances are that your app may not even know/care about ROCm, if it just uses a library like PyTorch / TensorFlow etc. So just check it's requirements first.

As for AMD vs nVidia in general, there are a few places mainly where they lagged behind: RTX, compute and super sampling.

• For RTX, there has been improvements in performance with the RDNA3 cards, but it does lag behind by a generation. For instance, the latest 7900 XTX's RTX performance is equivalent to the 3080.

• Compute is catching up as I mentioned earlier, and in some cases the performance may even match nVidia. This is very application/library specific though, so you'll need to look it up.

• Super Sampling is a bit of a weird one. AMD has FSR and it does a good job in general. In some cases, it may even perform better since it uses much simpler calculations, as opposed to nVidia's deep learning technique. And AMD's FSR method can be used with any card in fact, as long as the game supports it. And therein lies the catch, only something like 1/3rd of the games out there support it, and even fewer games support the latest FSR 3. But there are mods out there which can enable FSR (check Nexus Mods) that you might be able to use. In any case, FSR/DLSS isn't a critical thing, unless you're gaming on a 4K+ monitor.

You can check out Tom's Hardware GPU Hierarchy for the exact numbers - scroll down halfway to read about the RTX and FSR situation.

So yes, AMD does lag behind in nVidia but whether this impacts you really depends on your needs and use cases. If you're a Linux user though, getting an AMD is a no-brainer - it just works so much better, as in, no need to deal with proprietary driver headaches, no update woes, excellent Wayland support etc.

I based my statements on the actual commits being made to the repo, from what I can see it's certainly not "floundering":

In any case, ZLUDA is really just a stop-gap arrangement so I don't see it being an issue either way - with more and more projects supporting AMD cards, it won't be needed at all in the near future.

It's not "optimistic", it's actually happening. Don't forget that GPU compute is a pretty vast field, and not every field/application has a hard-coded dependency on CUDA/nVidia.

For instance, both TensorFlow and PyTorch work fine with ROCm 6.0+ now, and this enables a lot of ML tasks such as running LLMs like Llama2. Stable Diffusion also works fine - I've tested 2.1 a while back and performance has been great on my Arch + 7800 XT setup. There's plenty more such examples where AMD is already a viable option. And don't forget ZLUDA too, which is being continuing to be improved.

I mean, look at this benchmark from Feb, that's not bad at all:

And ZLUDA has had many improvements since then, so this will only get better.

Of course, whether all this makes an actual dent in nVidia compute market share is a completely different story (thanks to enterprise $$$ + existing hw that's already out there), but the point is, at least for many people/projects - ROCm is already a viable alternative to CUDA for many scenarios. And this will only improve with time. Just within the last 6 months for instance there have been VAST improvements in both ROCm (like the 6.0 release) and compatibility with major projects (like PyTorch). 6.1 was released only a few weeks ago with improved SD performance, a new video decode component (rocDecode), much faster matrix calculations with the new EigenSolver etc. It's a very exiting space to be in to be honest.

So you'd have to be blind to not notice these rapid changes that's really happening. And yes, right now it's still very, very early days for AMD and they've got a lot of catching up to do, and there's a lot of scope for improvement too. But it's happening for sure, AMD + the community isn't sitting idle.

The best option is to just support the developer/project by the method they prefer the most (ko-fi/patreon/crypto/beer/t-shirts etc).

If the project doesn't accept any donations but accepts code contributions instead (or you want to develop something that doesn't exist), you can directly hire a freelancer to work on what you want, from sites like freelancer.com.