Interesting question, I’d imagine that one major limit would be the number of cores your CPU has available. Once you got to more VMs than cores, I’d guess things would quickly grind to a halt?

But I wonder if you could even anywhere near to that point as on searching only L2 VM is mentioned on various sites and that is with warnings of severe performance limitations and for development testing only. While L3 might work the problems may get too bad you can’t practically go beyond that level?

So in terms of hardware, I use a Raspberry Pi 5 to host my server stack, including Jellyfin with 4k content. I have a nvme module with a 500gb stick and an external HDD with 4tb of space via USB. The pi5 is headless and accessed directly via SSH or RDC.

The Raspberry Pi 5 has H.265 hardware decoding and if you’re serving 1 video at a time to any 1 client you shouldn’t have any issues, including up to 4k. It will of course use resources to transcode if the client can’t support that content directly but the experience should be smooth for 1 user.

For more clients it will depend on how much heavy lifting the clients do. I my case I have a mini PC plugged into my TV, I stream content from my pi5 to the mini PC and the mini PC is doing the heavy lifting in terms of decoding. The hardware on the pi5 is not; it just transfer the video and the client does the hard work. If all your clients are capable then such a set up would work with the pi5.

An issue would come if you wanted to stream your content to multiple devices at the same time and the clients don’t directly support H.265 content. In that case, the pi5 would have to transcode the content to another format bit by but as it streams it to the client. It’d cope with 1 user for sure but I don’t know how many simultanous clients it could support at 1440p.

The other consideration is what other tools are being use on the sever at the same time. Again for me I live alone so I’m generally the only user of my pi5 servers services. Many services are low powered but I do find things like importing a stack of PDFs into Paperless NGX is surprisingly CPU intense and in that case the device could struggle if also expected to transcode content.

I think from what you describe the pi5 could work but you may also want to look at higher powered mini PC as your budget would allow that.

For reference I use dietpi as the distro on my server, and I use a mix of dietpi packages (which are very well made for easy install and configuration) and docker. I am using quite a few docker stacks now due to the convenience of deploying. Dietpi is debian based, and has a focus on providing pre configured packages to make set up easy, but it is still a full debian system and anything can be deployed on it.

Obviously the other consideration in the pi5 is an ARM device and a mini PC would be X86_64. But so far I’ve not found any tools or software I’ve wanted that aren’t compiled and available for the Pi5 either via dietpi or docker; ARM devices are popular in this realm. I have come across a bug in docker on ARM devices which broke my VPN set up - that was very frustrating and I had to downgrade docker a few months ago while awaiting the fix. That may be worth noting given docker is very important in this realm and most servers globally are still x86.

If I were in your position and I had $200 I’d buy the maximum CPU and GPU capability I could in 1 device, so I’d actually lean to a mini PC. If you want to save money then the Pi5 is reasonabkr value but you’d need to include a case and may want to consider a nvme or ssd companion board. Those costs add up and the value of the mini PC may compare better as an all in one device; particularly if you can get a good one second hand. There are also other SBC that may offer even better value or more power than a pi5.

Also bear in mind for me I have a mini PC and pi5; they do different things with the pi5 is the server but the mini PC is a versatile device and I play games on it for example. If you will only have 1 server device and pre exisiting smart tvs etc you’ll be more reliant on the servers capabilities so again may want to opt for the most powerful device you can afford at your price point.

Open Office? It hasn’t been touched in a decade. LibreOffice is the true continuation of Open Office, which was forked off after Oracle bought Sun and OO had been left with poor governance and slow updates.

Open Office finally ended up under the Apache foundation but hasn’t been maintained since 2014.

LibreOffice has had continual development with both bug fixes and new features, and the Open Document Foundation gives it good governance and independence as an open source project…

Honestly, switch to Libre Office.

I’ve always loved the Denver Airport conspiracy theory - that it is actually the secret headquarters of the illuminati or other organisations. It was $2bn over budget and has tunnels under it, which have led people to claim there are also secret bunkers under the airport. It also has a few bizarre pieces of art within it.

I think it’s just an airport with ugly aesthetic choices but I love that people think of all the places a global secret society would base itself, they’d pick Denver Airport.

Apparently there are 6 underground levels at the airport - but they’re used to run an airport. And the tunnels were for a failed automated baggage transport system. The art is just art.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/denver-airport-conspiracy

I have played with Arch in a VM - I learnt a lot about how Linux works setting it up. But the tutorials and guides are good, and you end up with a lean system with just what you want in it, and pretty much all configured directly by you.

I can see why Arch is a popular distro and base for other distros (like Manjero and currently rapidly growing CachyOS).

But I’m not at the point I’d want to main it. My issue is the concern that because everything is set up by me, it’s a much more unique system so if something breaks it could be a whole myriad of my own choices that are the cause. I’m nervous about having to problem solve things when they break and solutions not working because of how my particular system is configured. It’s probably a bit irrational but I do quite like being on an distro that lots of other people have the exact same configuration as me, so when things break there is lots of generic help out there.

That said I would consider arch based distros like Manjaro or CachyOS as they are in that vain of mostly standardised distro.

Lots of elements to this.

On the one hand a safe well paid job is very valuable to a lot of people. Even if it’s dull, job security is a huge thing and not to be taken lightly.

Having said that, if there is no progression then it may end up being a trap and not worth it. You say its well.paid but is it well paid overall - as in keep going until retirement in decades, or is it well.paid compared to other jobs at your current level of career?

If its just well paid for your level then it might make sense to take a pay cut to get into something new, interesting and with better progression and opportunities long term. If it’s well paid overall then you need to be thinking not just about now, but about how you’d feel in 10 or 20 years.

Going out into the field might be attractive now, but would it be attractive in 20 years? Have you got a job you might not value fully yet but may come to value as you get older?

Ultimately only you can decide what is more important to you about work. It’s natural to worry about doing something irreversible and regretting it. But it’s also important not to let fear get in the way of career progress. Sometimes you do need to move jobs to keep motivated or pursue better opportunities or even just because a well paid may just not be interesting enough or tolerable.

People talk a lot about work life balance now, which is great. But it’s not just about hours and working from home. It’s also about having a job you like and adds to your life, rather than one you hate or is drudgery. We spend about 1/3 of the week at work and it impacts everything else about our lives - money but also happiness and mental well being. So while it maybe a €300 pay cut, it may be worth it if you really enjoy it and it makes your work life better.

I used to use Homeplug to get network from my router front downstairs of the house to the my office upstairs and back. It’s a small house, and I thought the homeplug was ok - I was getting about 150-200mbps of my 900mbps; not great but I thought it was a good as I could get. The electrics are about 10 years old but I could see there was a lot of noise and error correction when I looked at the software that came with the plugs. Simple direct wifi connection was atrocious as the walls are largely solid brick.

Then a couple of years later I read about how good they Mesh systems could be so I decided to try a cheap one. I was skeptical as wifi hadn’t worked for me. I got a Google Wifi system (not a fan of google but it was a cheap system compared to other mesh networks); it has no backhaul connection, just 3 wifi points (one in front room, one in hallway and one in office), and my speed jumped to 500mbps and low latency. I also hadn’t realised how bad the latency had been on my homeplug set up - it was night and day.

I have since upgraded to an ASUS XT8 system; 2 units only and I now get close to 800mbps on a good day, and 600-700mbps floor. My PC in my office is where I work (which involves high data transfers) and also game and chill, it’s been a huge boon.

So yeah, Homeplug does the job but it’s not great in my experience. It was cheap compared to a mesh network, but you get what you pay for. You can get some of the cheaper and older mesh systems 2nd hand on ebay - but unfortunately a good system is pricey. In my experience it was totally worth it.

If you want to try Pop OS, go ahead. The most important thing is back up data you want to keep - it’s not a bad idea to have a dedicated partition for your home folder and another for the OS to help with fixing problems or moving to another distro, but backups off your laptop are critically important. Then if you don’t like a particular distro, or you fuck up, you can install another and restore your data from backup.

Personally I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, I’ve tried quite a few distros and I think generally for gaming they’re much the same. OpenSuSE has a good user interface in YaST for tweaking and keeping the system how I want it. I like being on a distro with a big install base and linked into an enterprise distro as there is an incentive to test rigorously and also fix things when they break. But Tumbleweed is a rolling release so there will still occasionally be problems.

If you want stability and no headaches then I’d go for a decent point release distro with a big install base overall. I’d suggest OpenSuSE Leap or Fedora KDE over smaller niche/community distros. Go for Gnome equivalents if that’s your thing. I have gone off Mint in recent months as I think too much support out on the Web is out of date and provides bad solutions to problems (such as adding random ubuntu repos to install software). Mint itself.Is a decent distro.

I’d avoid Ubuntu due to Snap, I’d avoid Debian due to its slow upgrade cycle (very stable distro but may not be the best for high end gaming and tweaking), and I’d avoid Arch due to the complexity of set up (unless you want your system exactly right and are prepared to problem solve your way to what you want; it can be a very powerful and efficient set up of you’re willing to out he work in). I’d also personally avoid atomic distros as it can be a headache to tweak and run custom software although there are ways if you enjoy leaning new things.

Agree although surprisingly the About section is a little vague on some of what OP wanted.

OP, it’s an SVG editor so should be perfect for real world projects you allude to. You can set the canvas size and change the default units with relative ease; Pixels, points, millimetres and inches but also Parsecs if you want to go wild, and as it’s SVG it’ll scale as needed without issue. https://logosbynick.com/change-the-canvas-size-in-inkscape/

There are also measurement tools too and areas can be calculated (but objects do need to be converted to paths to measure areas).

Everything else is covered in the about.

A quick google search shows that many people have issues with the Intel Integrated Graphics on this particular PC (including on Windows) and this seems to be the solution: https://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=17021&title=solution-for-intel-graphics-freezing-system

The main solution is Windows based but someone does offer a Linux route to the same solution, although a linked file that sounds like setting it up may be easier is missing. Essentially it looks like the chipset needs tweaking to throttle the GPU slightly to prevent the flaw triggering.

Great to see another person moving to Linux and OpenSuSE. My only caution if this is your first time with Linux is that a point release like OpenSuSE Leap is probably a better place to start than Tumbleweed. I’m on Tumbleweed and it’s generally good but I have had a few things break over the last couple of years, often fixed at next update in fairness but it is frustrating even as an experienced user. I have also had to reinstall Tumbleweed on one occasion; it wasn’t a big deal as I’d set up a separate Home and System partition. Tumbleweed is great but it is a rolling release and even though it’s a well tested one rolling releases are always riskier in terms of things breaking.

Agree, a USB stick live install is a good way to test - users should just bear in mind it is slower than a real install as USB drives are not as fast as internal hard drives. Once the OS is loaded fully it will feel reasonably snappy but still every piece of software you launch will take longer to load than a real install, and the bigger the software the longer it will take to load.

I also tended to recommend Linux Mint for beginners although I think I’m moving more towards recommending OpenSuSE Leap. The reason being it ships with KDE which is a slick interface with a Windows like set up by default (although very customisable - users can create MacOS or Gnome like interfaces with relative ease if they prefer) and gives a better idea of what modern Linux is capable of than Cinnamon in my opinion. Also KDE’s Discover app makes it easy to install software, comparable to Mint’s software store. Mint still has many more guides online but they’re often around terminal use and APT based solutions, and I’m beginning to think that is actually a bad thing. Most stuff for mainstream users can be done via the GUI, and KDE offer’s a great GUI. Plus Flatpak is a far better way of installing custom software than the APT recommendations I still see widely shared, so I think it’s actually better to move people away from Mint. Personally I think OpenSuSE Leap is the better option (and possible Fedora KDE Plasma edition although I am less familiar with it).

It will depend on the drivers that Audeze Maxwell supply? I can’t see any USB drivers for Linux beyond the dongle but they may exist.

However if they have a 3.5mm port then I’d use that. I have a Sony headset and while I don’t have any issues with Bluetooth, I do like to use 3.5mm analogue conenctions to save battery (even with noise cancelling on the battery lasts way longer off Bluetooth). I bought a long 3.5mm cable online and plug it into the front of my PC. No USB or Bluetooth faff, it just works, and at high quality.

However note that if you want the mic to work too it will depend on whether the headset’s 3.5mm jack is set up for both audio and mic (if it’s good quality it should be), plus you will need a 4pin 3.5mm plug and cable to pick up the mic from the headset and cable instead of the common 3pin audio only plug. At the other end if your pc has separate 3.5mm audio and mic jacks you will need an adaptor that splits the audio/mic into two cables to plug in to both jacks. If it’s a desktop there will be separate jacks around the back although sometimes the front jack may be a combined mic/audio jack, or you may also have one joint jack if it’s a laptop. If you do need to split the audio and mic then you can find these adaptors and also 4pin 3.5mm cables on ebay or amazon.

Edit: Just in case you’re not aware - an audio only 3.5mm cable has 2 coloured bands on the plug (splitting it into 3 metal rings or pins). An audio + mic 3.5mm cable has 3 coloured bands on the plug (splitting it into 4 metal rings or pins).

Edit 2: sorry look for 4 pole 3.5mm rather than 4 pin; you’ll see the better quality stuff when searching as pole is the correct term!

How familiar are you with Linux? If you’re new to it, pick something mainstream with lots of support and advice out there. I usually recommend Mint as a starter distro - it’s well supported, easy to use and doesn’t have the downsides of a distro like Ubuntu.

If you’re familiar with Linux then I’d recommend a point release distro and not a rolling release distro. Rolling release are cutting edge but that means much more opportunity for things to go wrong which isn’t a good thing to deal with if you’re new to Linux.

Beyond that, most distros dual boot well with Windows (although Windows is not well-designed and can occasionally break the bootloaders as others have said).

I’m on OpenSuSE and recommend it; it’s well designed with good tools in the form.of YaST. I’m personally not a fan of Fedora but I know a lot of people swear by it as a distro. Of the big distros I’d basically only really avoid Ubuntu because of how Snap is forced down people’s throats. I’m also personally not a fan of immutable distros due to the reliance on Flatpak and other downsides but your milage may vary.

Regardless, dual boot with Linux and Windows is a good solution. It’s how I got into Linux; my main PC still has a Win 10 partition which I don’t use but keep as a backup. My laptop and a living room.Media PC are pure Linux.

I’d say Win 11 in a VM is an alternative route for those few apps but I find windows is a bit laggy even on a decent PC. It’s perfectly usable - I’ve run Office and even windows at dual 4k without major issue, but there is a noticeable albeit small input lag and slowness in rendering the desktop that I found just annoying enough to put me off (even at 1080p single screen to be clear).

From reading it seems Win 11 does work fine if you pass through a discrete graphics card for it to use but that’s only doable if you have 2 GPUS. You might have that option if your laptop has a discrete graphics card as well as an integrated one. For me it reflects how bloated and poorly optimised windows is, but there are people who report getting Win 11 to work with high end games without issue although it takes some work. Meanwhile I can get Linux VMs on a Linux host to run at near native performance with ease.

There are free alternatives to Nitro Pro but if it’s an essential for you I’d try dual booting initially while.you test but don’t have to solely rely on VMs initially. If VMs do the job then wiping Windows will free up a lot of space and also stop it interfering in your Laptop set up.

There is nothing wrong with that PC but there is an opportunity cost to be aware of - upgrades.

A PC like that is static - you pay £600 and you get the PC, but after a few years if you’ve out grown it then you need to get a whole other PC. It’s the same with laptops.

However if you spend the £600 on a case, a motherboard, a cpu with a gpu, ram and storage you have a full starter PC. You can even save money by not paying for windows (built into the price of the mini PC) and get Linux for free. PCs are modular and any component can be upgraded and switched out at any time later.

So in a couple of years you may decide the PC is slowing down, or you’re out growing it, and you can swap in some more RAM or upgrade the CPU. Or you decide you can afford a dedicated graphics card, you can just buy the card and slot it in, and every £ goes into getting a great graphics card instead of starting again from scratch

Think of it like this: if you buy an all in one device you might spend £600 now and say another £600 in 3-5 years if you need to upgrade and fully replace it, and probably are still very limited in what you can get. A replacement will still have integrated graphics and still be behind cutting edge games, and just be a newer version of the same problem you have now. But with a full PC build you might spend £600 now for an OK PC and in 3-5years time you pay £600 just to add a great graphics card and have something way better than any mini PC. Or you spend £400 now and £200 in 2 years and £100 in 3 years and £500 in 4 years and gradually keep the PC how you want it without having to start from scratch. You end up with a decent PC now and gradually something powerful but without the upfront cost and without “wasting” money having to get a new device with a new motherboard, new cpu, new power supply, new RAM every time.You want an uplift .

It’s a crude example but the point is a full size PC can be expanded and switched up continously, and you can adapt it, and likely get something far better for the same money long term, while a fixed spec all-in-one device can serve a purpose for now but then needs total replacement when you outgrow it.

Building a full PC from scratch is easy - genuinely it’s plug and play, and only takes a bit of basic research to see what components are best to buy. There are loads of tutorials on how to put it together. Meanwhile your money goes much further over the longer term as you’re not having to buy a whole new PC everytime you need/want an upgrade - you can instead focus your money on the bits that need to change.

Even if you get a prebuilt tower PC now (ATX or Mini ATX) your money will go further AND you have something that you can upgrade and adapt. Although I think building from scratch is the best option as prebuilt Pcs are a false economy - they save money with cheaper components and you pay for labour on the build, when you can build it yourself for free and put every £ into better components.

Don’t be intimidated by building a PC - it’s nowhere near as difficult as it seems, and is an easy to obtain skill but worth learning as it’ll save you money, and allow you to fix and problem solve if you ever have problems in the future.

If.you have a PC now - even if it’s a pre build from a manufacturer - you can very likely open it up and start upgrading it now, and your money can go much further.

Brave is being forced to use Googles version of Manifest 3 meaning ad blockers and anti trackers are crippled in favour of advertisers and Googles ad business. Brave will be including 4 manifest 2 extensions in its backend but that’s it. They’re stuck because Google decided to screw over the entire Chrome based ecosystem.

Mozilla is implementing Manifest 3 differently so the original techniques for adblocking and privacy still work.

So the only choice is Librewolf. Sacrificing privacy and security for smoother animations and Web translation of pages is not worth it.

I find KDE works well with GTK3 and below, but GTK4 apps are set to ignore themes, which is a design decision on the GTK4 side. They invariably look completely odd and out of place as they often force the entire Gnome app UI as well as an unalterable theme.

And then Flatpaks also don’t generally follow system themes as they’re so sandboxed (although there are some work arounds, including making them consistent as flatpaks or allowing them access to the system theme folders to pick up themeing).

But anecdotally I’ve not had the level of title bar variability on KDE as that screenshot. Although admittedly I do tend to actively avoid Gnome apps as I don’t like the design philosophy.

Personally I’d be pissed off to be honest. It’s none of his business and this is crossing boundaries.

Being set up with random women you’ve never met and he himself likely barely knows is very unlikely to be successful. He’s also aggressive and rude about it. Why is he so angry you’re single?

This isn’t about the random date, this is about the way your dad treats you. You’re 22, not a child, it’s none of his business. How you react to this determines how he behaves in the future - if you don’t want him doing this again you need to tell him where to go.

It’d be interesting project but it seems overkill and over complicatiion when the simplest solution is dual booting and giving each OS complete access to the hardware. Hypervisors for all your systems would be a lot of configuration, and some constant overhead you can’t escape for potentially minimal convenience gain?

Are you hoping to run these OS at the same time and switch between them? If so I’m not sure the pain of the set up is worth it for a little less time switching between OS to switch task? If you’re hoping to run one task in one machine (like video editing) while gaming in another, it makes more sense but you’re still running a single i7 chip so it’ll still be a bottleneck even with all the GPUs and that RAM. Sure you can share out the cores but you won’t achieve the same performance of 1 chip and chip set dedicated to 1 machine that a server stack gives (and which Hypervisors can make good use of).

Also I’d question how good the performance you’d get on a desktop motherboard with multiple GPUs assigned to different tasks. It’s doubtful you’d hit data transfer bottlenecks but it’s still asking a lot of hardware not designed for that purpose I think?

If you intend to run the systems 1 at a time then you might as well dual boot and not be sharing system resources with an otherwise unneeded host for hypervisor software.

I think if you wanted to do this and run the machines in parallel then a server stack or enterprise level hardware probably would be better. I think it’s a case of “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should”? Unless it’s just a “for fun” project and you don’t mind the downsides? Then I can see the lure.

But if I were in your position and wanted the “best” solution I’d probably go for a dual boot with Linux and Windows. In Linux I’d run games natively in the host OS, and use Qemu to have a virtual machine for development (passing through one of the GPUs for AI work). The good thing in this set up is you can back-up your whole development machine hard drive and restore it easily if you make big changes to the host Linux. Windows I’d use for kernel anti cheat games and just boot into it when I wanted.

Personally I dual boot Linux and windows. I barely use windows now but in Linux I do use Qemu and have multiple virtual machines. I have a few test environments for Linux because I like to tinker, plus a docker server stack that I use to test before deploying to a separate homelab device. I do have a Win11 VM, barely used - it doesn’t have a discrete GPU and it’s sluggish. If you’re gaming I’d dual boot and give it access to the best GPU as and when you need it.

And if you want the best performance, triple boot. Storage is cheap and you could easily have separate drives for separate OS. I have an Nvme for Linux and another Nvme for Windows for example. You could easily have 2 separate discrete Linux installs and a Windows installs. In some ways it may be best as you’d separate Linux gaming from Linux working and reduce distractions.

Linux works great for gaming in my experience. I have a huge games library and I haven’t had many if any games that don’t run. There are certainly some games that need some tweaking to get working or optimisation to run well. I generally have those problems with older games though as my library includes some retro games (games for Windows 98 being the ones I have to tweak most).

Mods certainly do work - I’ve modded skyrim and rimworld extensively on Linux, as well as Oblivion, Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines, Minecraft and more without issue. Proprietary mod managers may not work but they’re often the poorer ones that are really just tools to advertise and market at you.

The vast majority of game mods work inside the game itself, so if the game runs on Linux the mods will work. The exception would be mods that need to run as a Windows program themselves separate to the game exe. Those can also be made to work, it’s just a bit more involved. Those kinds of mods are pretty rare in my experience though. Mods that act as game launchers etc work fine too, but just need some tweaking to ensure they launch instead of the game exe.

Most games mods can be manually installed and big games even have their own Linux native mod managers - like Minecraft custom launchers and Rimpy for Rimworld etc.

I do still have Windows on my PC in case I need it but haven’t used it for gaming in well over a year. I have a desktop so having a spare drive for windows is not a big deal to me but I’m tempted to wipe it as I don’t use it.

The one bit that people do have issues with is Anti cheat software for multiplayer games. That’s not an area of gaming I do, but I have seen reports of certain games using proprietary systems that lock out Linux. That’s a problem you can’t get round except by having Windows available on your system.If there is a specific game you want like that isn’t working on Linux.