I have used Ubuntu for about 5 years for my server, dual booting my desktop, and previously for a work laptop. In my experience, it’s solid on desktops, but I always had some issues on the laptop with Ubuntu, I think related to the graphics drivers. Literally last night I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop with KDE Plasma. Man, I love Plasma. It’s so much better than Gnome. And I don’t have any of the weird issues with the graphics driver, although I suspect that everything is running on the GPU, which will kill my battery. But I haven’t don’t any investigating yet. I did zero setup for Optimus. I just installed the proprietary Nvidia driver and launched a game to verify if it used the integrated graphics or dedicated graphics, and it was using the dedicated.
I like that literally all Linux software works for Ubuntu. By that I mean every software has a .deb package. You will always find guides for how to do things on Ubuntu. It’s a great beginner’s distro for this reason. There are even better distros based on it for beginners, too. I like apt a lot. It’s quick. I’m used to the syntax and commands. It comes with repositories by default that give you a massive selection of software. I don’t like that Ubuntu takes forever to get kernel upgrades. And the default apt repositories have very old versions of software.
OpenSUSE, while it’s not nearly as popular as Ubuntu, and therefore won’t have as many guides to do things, it fixes my issues with software being outdated and kernel upgrades lagging behind. Zypper is just okay imo. It’s slow. But the syntax and commands make sense to me (I don’t like pacman’s syntax or commands at all).
Idk, I’m happy with OpenSUSE for now. But I have only had it installed for half a day now.
KP_Insert is the 0 key on the number pad. Since you mention an Fn key, I'm guessing you either have a slim keyboard or a laptop of some sort. That means wouldn't have a number pad or its 0 key. At least not without it being enabled through, well, the Fn key or something like that, if some keys do double duty.
Curiously, upon checking my own system, the Insert keycode seems to be 110 not 118, but this might vary from keyboard to keyboard and system to system. Might be worth double-checking your own system anyway.
118 is associated with KP_MinPlus for me, whatever that is. Pretty sure whatever keypad key that is, I don't have one. (It's not KP_Plus or KP_Minus, which are what you probably think they are. There's also a KP_Comma entry, and I definitely don't have a comma on my keypad. Perhaps some other keyboards do, what with it being the decimal separator in some countries.)
As with my response to @palordrolap, I woke up at 4am, having gone to bed at just past midnight, and had several beers after a tough shift, then assumed (obviously incorrectly) that I knew what I was talking about. Sorry for my error.
The KP_ prefix means it ought to be part of the number pad (literally Key Pad), not the regular keyboard. If there is a keyboard with such a key, I didn't turn it up with a quick Internet search. (In fact a search now turns up my mention of it in this thread via a Lemmy instance. There can't be much information about it out there if even Google is reduced to linking my comments(!))
By comparison, there's apparently a rare Brazilian number pad layout that has a dedicated comma key, which is almost certain to be KP_Comma.
I did see a couple of layouts that put a copy of the +/= key on the keypad instead of the regular +. Maybe that's what ends up with the MinPlus key code despite the name being "wrong".
Key pad…ffs…of course! I’m literally facepalming right now. I had thought Key press. That’s what I get for working a long day with little sleep, then drinking several beers and thinking I should comment on things I don’t know much about.
pro tip use Linux distro from any of the lists posted here, use docker for your local llm, which are often Ubuntu based. consider getting a more modern graphics card like 30 series with 16gb vram
I had a contract come up and had to shelve this for a bit, and your comment immediately annoyed me, because it really isn’t what I wanted to hear
But it also stuck with me because it sounded like the advice I throw at new devs starting a project, knowing it’s a PITA up front, but pays dividends pretty quick.
So I looked it up, and despite my bad experiences with docker and kubernetes (I was tasked with doing weird, off label things with them and it sucked), I’ve decided to take your advice and stop looking for docker workarounds
And since it seems like it comes from a place of experience, I figured I’d share a bit more about what I want to do and see if you had any more advice
Basically, I want to link together basic models trained to do different things, with the end goal being something between a conversation partner and an assistant. The idea being I build very specific prompts to bypass the limitations of smaller models - the first goal is to take one LLM and a conventional management program and summarize key information, then use very specific structured prompts to generate a response to be vocalized and metadata that changes the state of the management system.
My thought is to take something like alpaca or falcon 7B to track and summarize relevant information, feed it into another such model trained as a conversation partner with this input and output format, then throw together a web interface and do text<->speech on my phone or dev computer.
When it comes to neural networks and LLMs, I have a good understanding of the theory of them and a great one of how brains work, but I’m mostly looking to use these systems as a black box initially. My initial goals are to generate dialogue trees for games and maybe practice my Spanish with a chatbot - accuracy and capabilities don’t matter too much, I’ve played with projects that could do this by just sending prompts to an endpoint
Down the road, the goal is to have something extremely modular. This tech is moving fast and I envision linking a bunch of modules together to perform different tasks, and as better modules come out or I add/upgrade hardware, I want to be able to write something to act like autopilot in my ide or pilot a model in a game engine
The main objective is to learn and to run agents on my own hardware. I’m looking for a side project that will be useful enough to keep up my interest, but also give me a starting point to modify from so I’m not sitting at a python terminal forcing myself through a tensor flow course before I get to the good stuff
Any thoughts, advice, or projects you think I should know about when starting this journey?
I like to not faff too much with my system for Dev work. I want to love pop but it eventually Bork’s at some point. But I love pop shell as a simple window manager like experience with good shortcuts.
So I currently use open suse tw gnome with pop shell. I’m well aware that one day this won’t work anymore but for me it’s solid.
Despite my experience I would recommend looking at pop as it ticks a lot of the boxes you stated. Big community, window manager workflow, Ubuntu based, styled without being distracting.
Are you in a tech support role at work? If so are you supporting Linux boxes, either servers or desktops? If yes then stick with BASH and learn VI - not because it is better, but because it comes with almost every distro (a small number install nano instead). If not, try out all the new stuff and see what suits you.
My workstation has been running Xubuntu LTS for over 10 years now, because I need a solid OS that I can upgrade easily and a desktop that doesn’t get in my way.
I switched over to Pop!_OS a year ago and I am extremely happy with my choice. I’ve recently had to go back to dual booting only because sunshine/moonlight streaming games across my home network was having serious issues with Linux–so only the games I want to stream up to my TV box are on windows. I 100% prefer Linux to Windows for everything you’ve mentioned, and Steam/Epic (Legendary game launcher(?)) has pretty much worked flawlessly. One minor quibble I have is that it is irritatingly hard to get mod managers working consistently, and I enjoy modding many of the games I play (Skyrim, oblivion, fallout, etc,.).
I’m chomping at the bit for the new Rust-based COSMIC desktop to be released by Pop!_OS though. Should be FY24.
I went to EndeavourOS with i3WM (from dual boot Windows/ Ubuntu) and have been loving the experience. It’s really helped push my boundaries with learning Linux.
I don’t have the information regarding xmodmap, but here are two other options which I am using if you are interested.
With the compose key set, you can hit / = to get ≠. Or you can set custom sequences in .XCompose, but I don’t believe you can get the exact combination you suggested.
You can only enable preconfigured options (which are defined somewhere under /usr/share/X11/xkb on my computer) using xmodmap.
You can create your own keyboard configuration using xkbcomp, but it’s a pain in the ass and not super well documented. I did that once but forgot all about it.
Edit: OK scratch that. I was thinking of setxkbmap, but I’m pretty sure there’s also a bunch of limitations to xmodmap. Sorry.
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