Episode 34: Single Use Linux, Family Gaming, 3D Printing & More

Hey everybody, welcome to episode 34 of the Dual Boot Diaries. I'm Will. We're on a Linux journey. We are doing Linux stuff. We're installing distros. We're booting on two versions of the OS and we're not experts, but we do actually have a Linux expert here today. Adam is out on a personal thing this week, but taking his place equally bearded is Jeff from Craft Computing. Welcome to the show, Jeff. We're so glad to have you here. Hello, hello. Thank you very much. This seems to be my week for filling in guest spots on podcasts. Usually it's me calling at the zero hour going, hey, can you fill in? I had someone with something going on. But this is my third guest spot in a week. Wow. You're like the Bill Murray of the tech podcast scene right now. Yeah, I'm doing the PR rounds right now. Yeah, it's like I think about like I've been getting on YouTube lately because I watched a couple of David Letterman clips. I've been getting like 90s talk show clips. Yeah. And there's a couple of people that just show up all the time. It's like it's like, you know, they're they're regulars. They lived in New York. It was easy to get them. And it was Bill Murray for a while. Then it seemed to be George Clooney, Brad Pitt. Like, yeah, there's like years at a time where it's just like, oh, yeah, this dude just shows up every every two weeks. Somebody who's A-list yet still available. So hey, thanks for being A-list and available, Jeff. We appreciate you. You're too kind, but thank you for having me. And this is a departure from you because usually you're an evening podcast person, as I recall. Yeah, yeah. This morning it's coffee instead of beer, so I hope you're, you know. It feels weird, but yeah, I think we can manage. Well, okay, so we get to see Stimulant Jeff this morning. Let's see. So first thing, we have two topics we're going to hit today. We're not going to do the normal thing because Adam's not here. We'll pick up homework and stuff from last week next week on the next regular episode. But today we're going to talk about – well, you've switched your entire family to Linux for gaming. I did. Yes. Which I have a lot of questions about because I don't think that would go super well in my house. I have some answers. Okay. But before we do that, I want to talk about single-serve computing because I've been working on this project. It's off to my right back here where I've basically moved my streaming setup. I have a two-PC streaming setup, so I'm basically piping one computer's output into the second computer. And I've moved that to Linux, and I'm working on making it kind of a single-serve computer, right? It just boots up automatically. The stuff that I need launches. It connects to my stream deck. And then I can just hit some buttons and go without having to really think about what's going on in that computer. And then – but there's some issues, right? So like at the end of that process, when I turn it off, I would love for it to just download the updates and install them without me having to think about it. And there's like stuff like that that would be really nice to get to. But like I'd love to hear what I like what you're doing and how you use it and where you kind of start when you're thinking about this process. Yeah. So, yeah, single serve computers. I do them a lot, not necessarily in a physical sense, but I do a lot of one time use VM spin ups or single function VMs. Uh, specifically when I'm doing testing for, for new software or hardware combos, um, uh, I do a lot of, uh, what I call self-hosted cloud gaming testing. And so I'll, I'll get like a server graphics card and I'll throw it into a server and then I'll bifurcate it out so I can use that one GPU to render games on multiple machines. And those VMs that I spin up into being like single use, the only reason they exist is to open steam and run a benchmark. Okay. And so I do that same kind of thing all the time. And luckily, my day job used to be building Windows images for deployments for organizations. And so I'm pretty well versed in custom image spin ups and, you know, automation tasks and things like that. So what do you want to know? Yeah. Well, OK, let's let's talk about the cloudy. Let's talk about the cloud stuff. I've been following that, I think it's Cloudy Gamer subreddit for years and years just as a kind of like, hey, if you have – when you have friends who want to get into PC gaming, I really think it started with PUBG because people wanted to play PUBG and they didn't want to buy a 980 or 1080 or whatever the hot card was at the time because they were kind of expensive. And I started pointing people toward things like GeForce Now. And then I became aware of that kind of self-hosted, like, do roll your own version of GeForce Now thing without any of the GeForce Now limitations. It kind of just works. And I guess the first place to start is where does it – like, how much does that cost, actually? Amazingly enough, if you're the kind of person who has a server, like I'm part of Homelab communities and I do a lot of self-hosted stuff. If you have a server somewhere and you have a graphics card, you can pass that graphics card through to a virtual machine and treat it just like a gaming PC. It's not running – it's running physical hardware, but it's a virtualized instance of whatever OS you want to run, whether it's Windows or a Linux distra. Like Bazite is awesome for stuff like this. But, yeah, it's super simple to pass through a graphics card to a virtual machine. And then if you have friends who want to, you know, try out PC gaming, but all they have is like a Chromebook or a laptop or an iPad or something like that, you can have them connect with a remote client and use a full on gaming desktop from whatever device they have. And are you using something like Moonlight and Sunshine or using one of the more commercial things? There's Parsec is probably the most well-known commercial one. There's a couple others, but Parsec's probably the silver bullet for most use cases, especially like remote. You know, the person isn't on your local LAN. But for internal, I usually use Sunshine and Moonlight as a streaming combo. There's also a really neat fork of Sunshine called Apollo. And what that does is it adds virtual display driver support. One of the weird things with virtualized gaming is in order for graphics cards to work, to render a game, they have to have a display connected. If you virtualize a graphics card, it doesn't have a display connected. And so there's no frame buffer to be able to write to, to be able to read from, to be able to actually get your games out. Apollo is a really neat tool. It's basically Sunshine, but with a virtual display driver. And so it handles the let's create a 1080p display and we'll attach it to your graphics card virtually. And now we have a thing to render to. So it's funny. I do that in Linux with Sunshine by piping it out to the capture card on my second – because the capture card is always hot just because USB never turns off on that PC. Yeah, yeah. And that works great. I know some people use like HDMI dongles for that. I use Apollo on the Windows side because it handles – like on Linux, it's really easy for me to have a little script that runs when I launch a game that connects. When Moonlight connects, I run a little script that turns off the monitors on my desk and makes that the only monitor that's connected. so the games just kind of go to that not turned on monitor on the capture card, right? On Apollo, on Windows, that's really hard to do, it turns out. And Apollo just kind of solved that problem for me. And it's awesome. So that, like, these monitors turn off. I'm not running a bunch of extra monitors I don't need. And, yeah, I'm a big fan of Apollo. It doesn't work as well on Linux, in my experience. No. And, in fact, the virtual display driver in Linux is like a compile-from-source thing, and I've had about a 5% success rate getting it to work. It's better to get that. Like when Adam was doing virtual machine stuff, we found it was easier to just buy a $20 HDMI dongle that you plug in when you need it. I have literally dozens of them around for various things. So, OK, so if you're doing this is interesting for if you have the rack, but if you don't have the rack, you can do the same thing with like one of the cloud computing providers, too. Right. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. You can actually Microsoft Azure is a really interesting use case because through Microsoft Azure, you can lease out an AMD V710, which is one of their cloud connected GPUs. And it supports full rasterization. Not many enterprise GPUs do these days. Oh, but the V710 is a Navi 32 based card. So it's RDNA 3. uh it's it's essentially equivalent to like a 7700 xt or something um and so you can just rent an azure instance with four cores and one of these v710 instances and create your own cloud gaming system no service provider required is that an hourly cost at that point yeah it's an hourly cost at that point um there's also a whole bunch of other providers i've worked with um oh gosh what was the the company called um ah i'm drawing a blank now there's quite a few something right it's not rack space no there was a company out of toronto that was doing like full leased bare metal machines oh i remember that yeah yeah yeah there's like this is this is the thing that pops up on cloudy gamer all the time is there's the combination there's the are you going to lease a full machine and like essentially rent a computer in the cloud that's yours all the time Right. Or does it make more sense to just pay for the three hours a week that you play if you're a light gamer? Yeah. If you're a really light gamer, the paying three hours for an Azure instance is probably the best way to go. I know with the the one that I'm thinking about of Toronto, they gave you like a four hour block per day. And so if your schedule meets that, it was something like twelve dollars a month and you get four hours a day every day. yeah um plus you get like six of six flex hours so if like on a weekend you're like oh it's 10 in the morning i want to play a game it doesn't cost you any extra and then if you do go over it's like a dollar dollar 50 an hour something like that so pretty affordable compared to gaming pc prices yeah compared to a thousand dollars worth of ram yeah um what uh like what i guess on the aws side and the azure side the kind of more commercial stuff i'm always really like terrified of messing up the billing uh you know it's you you it's easy to get in there and like hit a button and be like oh man i just accidentally got a thousand dollar bill i gotta call and get them to excuse for me what you don't want to do is leave fur mark running and then close the window and never come back to it because that sounds expensive yeah yeah usually that just kills your gpu but this time it's gonna kill your bank account too yeah you kill the gpu and your credit card well So the thing on the plus side, having done this on the commercial sense and having run game servers and stuff like that, and if you make a mistake that costs a lot of money that you're not actually using once or twice, they'll often work with you on that. Yeah. So it's not like the end of the world if you do make an honest mistake and cost yourself a ton of money. They might kill your account after you make the honest mistake and be like, hey, we don't want your business anymore. But that's okay. Yeah, but most of these data centers are paying like 12 cents a kilowatt hour for power. So, you know, you running a graphics card at full bore, it's going to cost them, you know, $6 in electricity for a month versus, you know, they'll charge you $1,000 for the instance because you were taking up other commercial space. But yeah. But so how do you manage? Do you like you just have to understand how this stuff works really well to manage costs or is it? Basically, yeah, there's also things that you can do, like when I close my session, close all active programs and, you know, you can script out things like that. But for the most part, I do a lot of hosting with that kind of stuff at home. And the thing about you, like you mentioned, oh, if you have a server rack, that's nice and easy. You don't even need a server rack. If you've got your old gaming PC, drop two graphics cards into it, install Proxmox, pass two graphics cards through to a virtual machine, and now you have a one PC, two gamer remote situation that you can use. That you can give to friends when you want to play games with them. Yeah, that you can give to friends or they can just dial into. So that's fascinating. And so Proxmox, for folks who don't know, is a hypervisor, home lab thing. You can kind of kind of sits underneath all the other stuff and then you can run images or Docker containers or whatever you want on it. Yeah, it's it's essentially a Debian based distribution that has all the standard Linux virtualization stuff. It's based on KVM and QEMU, which are standardized virtualization processes. But it has a really nice GUI over the top of it. It's really intuitive, really easy to use. Everything is is basically point and click for setup. And you can spin up virtual machines and pass through graphics cards and boom, you have gaming PCs. Well, and you could also do stuff like run a Plex image or something like that in the background that then uses the GPU to decode when they're not being used for other things and stuff like that, right? Yeah, absolutely. So that's not a single service computer at that point. That's like a Swiss Army knife computer is what you're talking about. Right, right. um what are do you do any like the classic example of hey i have a problem and i want to solve it is with a with like a little machine is either like home assistant or raspberry or a pie hole or something like that you know yeah i think everybody started like i started with a home assistant machine by taking an old raspberry pi that was sitting around was like oh maybe this will be better than than my smart things hub and about 15 minutes later i was like oh yeah we're smart things that I are breaking up. New bestie is Home Assistant. And I've never looked back. But do you do, both of those come prepackaged, right? So basically, you have the hardware, you're downloading an image, you install the image on a flash drive or a small SSD or something, and then you're good to go. Have you done anything where you roll your own kind of single service machine, single serve machine? I do. So for basically service host kind of things. I mean, that's the essence of home labbing is how can I run a thing that makes my life easier or provides a service And so in my server rack I have multiple nodes that are running Proxmox and those are running virtual machines that serve things like Plex or Piehole or you know all the Home Assistant all the popular services A lot of those are just, you know, easy download installs and you run them and they just kind of run. I have also rolled my own. Probably one of my most popular self-built ones is a VPN gateway. And what that is, is kind of like pie hole is like your own self-hosted DNS with ad blocking. If you use a commercial VPN service like NordVPN or something like that, you'll know that it only has clients for certain devices and you have to log in on your phone, connect to Nord, and then now you're through a VPN tunnel. But what if I have like an Amazon Fire Stick on my TV and I want to watch out of out of region content? There's no easy way to pipe your smart TV through a VPN to be out of region. They intentionally don't provide that as a feature, just to be clear. Correct, yeah. Through the VPN gateway, all I do is instead of sending my fire stick out to the internet at large, is I have a little virtual machine that all it does is run OpenVPN and connects to NordVPN. and I can select which server that I want back to connect to. But then that server also routes any incoming traffic on my LAN and sends it to the VPN. So it never touches the open Internet outside of that tunnel. So I can pipe any device in my house through a VPN and have it come out anywhere in the world that I want, including my fire sticks, including gaming handhelds, including all client free. the client or the device you're using is completely oblivious to the fact that it's going through the tunnel. How do you do that? Just by setting the gateway in your network settings to that address? Yeah. You change the gateway from like my network gateway is 10 0 0 dot 1. The virtual machine is 10 0 0 dot 10. And so all I do is change the gateway IP on my client device and it goes through the VPN instead. That is wild. I've got to get I've got to get on that business. We watch a lot of Australian Survivor in this house and it turns out it's a real pain in the butt. So, yeah. Yeah, we do a lot of BBC programming. We watch the Canadian Olympics coverage because screw NBC. I got to say, like, I'm a big fan of complaining about NBC's Olympics coverage over the years. This year, they finally gave me the thing that I wanted, which as long as I paid for Peacock, of course, which was, hey, you could just watch the event. There's nobody talking over it. There's no human interest nonsense. It's not just the Americans and the three people who win. It's like the actual, you get to watch the whole thing. And I was like, oh, this is fantastic. I watched like 15 hours of curling. It was just on my TV while I was down here working and no commentary or anything like that. And it's just like sitting up in the stands and it's a couple of cameras that'll pan back and forth, but you get to watch all the events. The problem I had was that my wife was like, hey, they're not talking. They're not, there's none of the, there's none of the stories about the people here. And I was like, oh no, oh no, I didn't know this about you oh they got to her no 30 years we've been together this is terrible to find out this late in the relationship um is it too late to tap out yeah yeah we can get this annulled right um so okay uh i'm just kidding sweetie i know you're not watching but it's a joke uh i had no intention of coming on and ruining your marriage yeah thanks thanks for that we we've been dating since the 90s it's good good first i first i find out about you in the motion smoothing and then you destroy my marriage. I'm never having you on the show again, Jeff. I'm taking you down one peg at a time, man. Like, you're quietly destroying my life, just pulling the underpinnings out. No, that's fantastic. That is an incredible, and you've done videos about that. I feel like I've seen those before. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I did one. I updated it just a couple of months ago because privacy and data autonomy and sovereignty has been kind of a hot button topic in the world of tech lately with, you know, various websites going dark in certain states and age requirements and all kinds of stuff. And it's like, well, what if you would just wanted to sail from friendlier waters? Like, here's a way that you can do that. So, OK, so that kind of stuff you're running on Proxmox. It sounds like you don't have a lot of dedicated machines. You're just you're just doing. yeah a lot of vms is what i spin up i i've got probably about 12 to 15 virtual machines that some of them are single function some of them are are roll my own services some of them are just pre-downloaded like plex and and home assistant and things like that um but uh yeah so when you roll your own where do you start like if you're if you're starting with a vm do you start with debian do you start with ubuntu something that's relatively straightforward i usually go Ubuntu server is is people love to hate on Ubuntu because it's like, oh, that's not real Linux or it's Linux with training wheels or whatever. It's like, yeah, I kind of like that because I can install the service I want and then it just kind of runs and I know it's going to get updated. Is it the latest bleeding edge, you know, packages? No, but I also know it's probably going to be stable when the update hits me. So that for me is the question is right. Do I need the brand new version or is like living six months in the past fine? If living six months in the past is fine, Ubuntu is great, right? Yeah. And you get all the immediate security updates for Ubuntu too. It's just some of the kernel level stuff doesn't quite get to you on day zero. Maybe it's day 35 that it gets to you. Well, for me, it's stuff like OBS is often like a couple of major revisions behind, right? Yeah. And you can work around that by using snaps or flat packs or whatever, but there's some downsides on that. But on a server, I'm less like it's less important, right? Like, yeah, curl doesn't get updated in a major way that often, it turns out. Right. Yeah. And like for my VPN gateway, I'm using the open VPN open source client that just runs on Ubuntu server. I'm using the Ubuntu firewall to handle all the routing. And so that doesn't get updated. And it's also I'm not accessing this machine directly and doing different things with it. It's literally serving that one function. And that just needs to run. You made me realize that I want this, but for my cloud storage, like I want the same thing, right? I want a machine that's just sitting there running our clone. That's basically like an Samba endpoint on my network that I can then connect to all of my cloud stuff without having to have the cloud clients actually running on the machine. Yeah, you can do, I believe, NextCloud supports syncing. And so it will download your cloud files onto a local host, and then you can access your files on the local box that will sync with your cloud provider. But you can access them without actually having to install the Google Workspace client or the Dropbox client or whatever else. Yeah. I think you could also do that with our clone, right? You could use our clone to just have mount points on like a spin up virtual machine that lives. Yeah. Anyway, wheels are spinning. OK, so you start with the OS. You install the packages you need. Do you have like a base, an empty VM that you start with that you spin up once? Or is it just easy enough that you just do fresh installs when you're doing a new VM? It's easy enough. I typically just do brand new installs and then run updates as soon as it downloads. And then I'm on the latest version and we're good to go. There are ways to basically build your own packages and images. And like I said, I used to design images and build them from scratch as a day job for like six or seven years. And let me tell you, that gets old really quickly. It saves a lot of time if you're deploying 500 images, but it doesn't save time if you are deploying one image every three weeks. But my first job out of college was maintaining about 1,200 computers for university biology department. And it was before that stuff really existed, like partition magic and and cycle. What are the disk imaging tools? I can't remember. Oh, gosh. And we were like, oh, this imaging thing, this is this has got some real juice. yeah uh yeah there was uh norton ghost for a while that was a popular one ghost we ghost we used ghost wouldn't do there was something about ghosts that wouldn't work i think it messed up the bootloader or something i can't remember um there was another one from like side quest or part of the it might have been for the partition magic people that made it that made it suddenly a viable thing and it completely saved us during the the um the the windows the night look i'm old Jeff. So it was during the Y2K bug lead up where we were, where we were updating every device in the, like, if you want to, if you, if you ask me how to update a sun microsystem spark machine, I got you. I can do that. I can tell you how to update that for Y2K, but I started doing, doing image deployment for windows 2000 and XP. So I'm not that much younger than you. Just a little bit. Just a smid. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, okay. So you have the OS installed, you get your services. How do you make sure that that instance stays updated and stuff like that? How do you make sure it gets security updates and all that? For the most part, usually about once a month, I'll just run an apt update and an apt upgrade just on all the VMs. I'll log into them and do it. Again, you can script this out if you wanted, but it's also nice if you hear about a potential bug in your newsfeed or whatever else for a service that you're running, you go, oh, I just don't want to run that one for that, that client this day. Um, and, and I'll skip that one and then I'll do it the next month. Um, cause you'll go, Oh no, they, they broke the, like the Ubuntu firewall broke in, in this weird way that I happen to use on this service. I'm just not going to run the update on that machine this day. So how, um, how much time are you spending maintaining this stuff? Do you think at the end of the day? Not that much, not that much time. Um, like I said, usually the first Saturday of every month is update day. And I'll just come downstairs with my coffee. And 20 minutes later, I've pushed updates to all my machines. Like it's... Just apt update, install, apt update, copy and paste it into 35 different terminals. Yeah, exactly. Wherever possible, I try to make sure I'm using Package Manager for... Like Plex, you can download the dev package for Plex and then install it manually. But then you don't get updates with the rest of your system updates. You have to manually reinstall or use the Plex GUI to go in and push an update. Hit the button, yeah, yeah. Versus they also have a repo version of the Plex server that when you apt update, you'll get that as well. And so if a package is available there, I usually just get that. Yeah, like in my experience on Linux, it's been better to live inside either the package manager or like the Flatpak ecosystem. Exactly. Although on server stuff, I often use Docker. Like for Plex, getting the Docker container set up and working was a real pain in the butt just because getting GPU acceleration through Docker 100 years ago when I set that up was weird. It's much easier now, it seems like. But that provides a similar – like in order to update the Docker container, I just restart the Docker container and it pulls the new image and all that kind of stuff just happens automatically, which is nice. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's I think this is a pretty good rundown. What am I forgetting to ask you about here? I feel like security like do you with the VMs, you do network. So each machine gets its own IP address. So that's pretty straightforward. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. With a virtual machine. I mean, you know, you get essentially a virtual network card. It's got its own Mac address on the network. It gets an IP address just like anything else. It's just not a physically separate device. you know, device. It's one cable coming into the server. Are you doling out static IP addresses to all these microservices or I guess where they were needed? Yeah, for the for the microservices like Plex, Plex has a static IP address because I also do port forwarding so I can access my Plex server from outside. Same with a couple of other services that I run. Some of my and then there's other ones like my DNS server, my pie hole, my those need static IP. So your clients know where to find them. Um, if, if a service needs a static IP address, sure. Uh, if it doesn't go DHCP, that's totally fine too. If it just needs to be a service that runs on the network. Um, but, uh, yeah, uh, I, I run, uh, two VLANs. I have a server, uh, server VLAN for all of my, my services and physical boxes and management and switches and things like that. And then I have a client VLAN, which is basically my Wi-Fi network. And so it's not quite a flat network, but things can still communicate between the two. And if you have good working DNS, you can, you know, access things by name or by service and you don't have to port forward or do weird things between the networks. Does that mean you can do stuff like, like AirPlay and all that kind of stuff still works, right? Yes. Okay. AirPlay is a fun one. Yeah, AirPlay is a nightmare. Yeah. There is a really simple tool that you can run on a network as a service as a standalone single purpose box called an AVEI repeater. And basically what that does is it emulates a Bonjour box. AirPlay and all those associated protocols still run on Apple Bonjour as a protocol. All you do is you give the server a network endpoint in each of those two networks, and it will take any Bonjour broadcast traffic from each network and rebroadcast it to the other. Oh, across the subnets, across the subnets. Yep. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. It's a stupid, simple service. That completely. So that's A-V-A-H-I. Yeah. Yeah. A-V-A-H-I. I have never heard anybody pronounce that before. So that's fascinating. That's not how I would have said that. But OK, so that is magic. I didn't know that existed. I'm going to have to set that up because I've resisted doing VLANs specifically because I want to be able to airplay stuff from one thing to the other. And like they don't fit into natural silos, really. Strangely enough, I've never done a tutorial on that. That should be one that I have a video on. I would watch that video. I would watch the video and share it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I used to do it work for for clients including schools and things like that And you know back when Apple TVs were like oh we have to have an Apple TV connected to the projector in this classroom It like OK well how do we manage that infrastructure and how do we make sure that the clients within that classroom can communicate with that Apple TV that may be on a drop that's in the same VLAN and maybe it's not getting the teachers, computers and the kids iPads all connected to the Apple TV. Look, I can tell that Portland that Oregon schools are better funded than California schools because we still have the Apple TVs connected to our projectors. And they're not the new Apple TVs either. They're the old, they're the first gen black boxes. They're like 15 years old at this point. Yeah, yeah. They do not run a version of tvOS. Yes. But yeah, that's fascinating. At some point, I need to talk to you about how to do VLANs right because I'm in a situation where my one, this is completely off the Linux talk, but sorry, I apologize. But my default subnet is almost out of IP addresses, and I'm just good enough at networking to understand why I should be careful making changes here, but not good enough to do it in an intelligent and safe way. So anyway, to be continued. But I think this is a great place for us to take a quick break and thank our sponsors, our advertising overlords for supporting the show. Jeff, we will be right back in just a moment. And we're back. It was incredibly fast. That was I didn't even finish my coffee yet. Warn me next time. Look, I told you it was going to be a quick break. I didn't. It's probably a little quicker for us than for listeners at home. But thanks to our magic going on there. Yeah, it's almost it's almost just like I marked the space that the ad goes in the show and then nothing happened for us. So let's see. We're getting real attention to the man behind the curtain. Adam's not here. So there's no rules, man. We are going to talk about I want to like. So my wife doesn't play a lot of PC games. She's not a big PC gamer. She gets motion sick when we play shooters. So it kind of shuts down a lot of the PC gaming space for her. But I feel like if I switched my her computer to Linux, I would probably have a like it would it would that would be the final nail in the coffin, honestly, after the Olympics thing and the motion smoothing. That would be it. Tell me what you've done and how it's going. Yeah. So I have my office downstairs and I've got a gaming PC over here and I've been on Linux for a long time. And in fact, there's one Windows PC in my entire office and it's actually my little arcade box that's behind me. Oh, wow. And that's running Windows seven because that's the easiest way to run an arcade machine. The last good Windows. Yeah, exactly. But recently, my wife needed a PC upgrade. Her PC was getting to be about four ish years old and was starting to chug in a couple of games that she plays. And so great time for upgrading. Yeah. Yeah, exactly what you want to do right now. Yeah. No kidding. um so uh luckily as a reviewer sometimes you get hardware in and it was really nice so uh minis forum actually sent over a pc for review it was the g1 pro uh it's a 16 core zen 4 mobile cpu but with an rtx 50 60 desktop graphics card inside of it and it's a killer killer rig it's like one of their little boxes yeah it's it's basically the same size and shape as like a ps5 It stands vertically. Holy cow. It's a super cool machine. That's right. So anyway, I'm like, OK, once I'm done with the review, you can have this one that this is a fantastic upgrade for you. And but her old PC was also on Windows 10. And she goes, I don't know that I want to move to Windows 11. I, you know, I've heard you, you know, complain about Copilot and all the all the weird things that Windows does. And I went, yeah. Would you be willing to give Linux a shot? Wait, you didn't just send her the letter that they posted a couple weeks ago? They're like, hey, man, we hear you. We hear that you don't like Windows anymore and we're going to make it better. She didn't buy into the hype. She wasn't like on board with. She's not willing to wait for them to remove Copilot from Notepad. She just wants it gone. OK, fair, fair. And so she kind of like she asked the question like, hey, what should I move to? And I went, whoo. So we went ahead and installed Bazite onto her machine. And there were a lot of questions about like, well, is all my software going to work? And I went, I don't know. But there's really only one way to find out. And that's. Does she primarily use it? Is this a piece you use mostly for games or is it work in games? Mostly for games. She does do a lot of side projects. So she's a homemaker. She takes care of our kids, doesn't have full-time employment, but she does a lot of crafting stuff. That counts as full-time employment. Oh, it absolutely does. Yeah, no. Yeah, that's a whole other conversation. Yeah. Simply saying she doesn't have any required tasks from a bill-paying standpoint. The work is self-imposed rather than – Yes, exactly. Got it. Okay. She's an independent contractor is what I'm hearing. Yes. um so uh she goes well i know all my games will work but what about you know uh all the other things that i do like can i still get on facebook i'm like yeah it's got a browser you can get on facebook you can do all that kind of stuff she goes okay well what about like some of my crafting stuff uh she has an embroidery machine she has a cricket vinyl cutter and i went i don't know that's a great question and i can't answer that until we try and so she goes all right let's try and we installed Bazite and she is 100% for gaming. All of her games work. They install through the Steam client. I think there's been one game that I had to specify use a different version of Proton. And so we've had to access like the context menu once to go, oh no, use Proton 9 instead of experimental. And then the game fired up. That's pretty good. Like I've had really good luck. Like it seems like even in the nine months or whatever that I've been running Linux day to day, it's gotten much better, like that aspect of it. The Proton 11 stuff that's coming out now seems like real fire, absolute hot fire business from Valve. Yes. Add in the little bit of, what is it, Flex, or FeX, the ARM compatibility that's coming. Ooh, I cannot wait. Yeah, I'm incredibly excited to see how well that goes. um so okay i want to talk about the crafting stuff because i've been kind of it's interesting how i have a 3d printer i do laser cutting i have a glowforge in the garage um i haven't done cricket or embroidery machine type stuff in a long time and that's i switched to linux yeah um and i was gonna say that like the bamboo the 3d printing game on linux is shockingly good really good yeah like between orca like orca as the open solution and um the bamboo studio software just running natively on Linux great is kind of remarkable and was completely unexpected. The Glowforge stuff is all web-based, so it works fine. I mean, I realize that there are a large number of people out there who are like, oh, I've got to use the web to blah, blah, blah. In this case, I don't care because I'll take the convenience over the... A tool is a tool, and as long as you can use it, it's a good tool. Yeah, and if they shut down the servers at some point and kill my 10-year-old Glowforge, I'll be upset. But until then, I'm going to continue enjoying what I've got. Yeah. But but how does the cricket go? How does how do the embroidery machines work? The embroidery machine was basically a nonstarter. I tried multiple ways. The software was Windows only. I tried multiple ways to get it working. Lutris is a great tool for trying to get obscure pieces of software up and running, even though it's primarily used for gaming, but it has all the same compatibility layer components that you would want for getting just a Windows executable going. Well, so let's talk about that a little bit, because this is something I've seen people talk about and I haven't really spent a lot of time with. Would you say that you mean you can choose which version of Wine it uses and stuff like that? Yeah. And you can build per application profiles for things, right? Yeah, exactly. So you can choose which version of Wine, because Lutris also can use all the Steam versions of Proton and Wine and DXVK and all that kind of stuff. But it also has its own versions and like GE Proton and different builds. And until you try it, you don't know. But what I can say is the particular embroidery software that she uses was a nonstarter. It doesn't work, at least on Bazite. I could not get it to run. Did you try running it through an emulator and just piping the USB? I assume it's a USB connection. Yeah, it's a USB connection to that. we could probably do like some kind of virtual instance or something like that and and and make that work she also has a windows laptop and so i just went for right now just use your your embroidery on the laptop and uh and in fact we have a a cable on the desk so she can plug her laptop in and then use her keyboard mouse and monitor to do the embroidery stuff so look look my my family business when i was a kid was a whole load of sorry adam beep a whole bunch of embroidery machines in a in a factory in northeast tennessee and the way the way you run those is with a dedicated computer each one now in that at that time the dedicated computer was a box about the size of a mini fridge uh that had a giant paper tape machine on it but that was just because the embroidery machine business was lagged a little bit behind the modern computers in the 80s and early 90s yeah anyway uh so okay dedicated computer for the embroidery machine how's the cricket do i assume there's probably software for that given how it's how widely available those Yeah, the cricket actually works pretty darn well. And so she's found no no differences or bugs or anything that she couldn't do in Linux that she could do in Windows. And and so that's been great. Was she on what was she using to make the make the art for the for these things? Is she using like Inkscape or something like that? Or was she on Adobe before? I know she's used Inkscape before. She never used Photoshop or Illustrator or anything like that. I believe she used basically just like the vector tool that's within the Cricut software, and I know she's used Inkscape as well. OK, so I know I know in my school community, Canva rules all. It seems like in terms of like creating those kinds of factory assets for for flyers and stuff like that. I didn't know how they live in the in the cricket and other communities. Yeah. And basically the same kind of thing. She's getting clip art and modifying it to do various different things. We have a special needs child. Our youngest is special needs. And so we have a vinyl patch that she printed on the side of our car. That is a place that he puts his hand. So when we get out of the car, he knows to put his hand there so she can turn around and close the door and grab bags and things like that. That's amazing. Yeah. And but printed it out with something that he likes. And so, yeah, a little incentive to keep your hand on the car. That's that's that's incredible. Like, it's funny, that kind of stuff. Like, so I I spent a lot of time with 3D printers a long time ago when they were bad. And I hadn't gotten a modern printer. I hadn't used a modern printer in a while. And then I had a friend of the show, Norman Chan, from Tested on the TechPod a few weeks ago. And we talked about 3D printers. And he completely sold me in like an hour, hour and a half long conversation. Yeah. So I got a P2S here. And I've been like it's amazing, A, how little I have to think about the actual 3D printing. It's much more about like loading up the like doing the design and thinking about a little bit about how you want it to like how you can orient it. So it's going to print well. But the printing is so easy now compared to what it was even like five or 10 years ago. Oh, absolutely. Even five years ago, it's a night and day difference. Sorry, we're getting off the Linux track, but I want to I want to talk 3D printers because you started it. It's my fault. Yeah, I have a Prusa Mark III S Plus, and that was my daily driven workhorse for all of my stuff. I did a lot of design work. I design cases for devices that I sell and need to be able to print them out reliably. And that is a heavily modified printer. It's got a 60 watt Dragonfly hot end. It's got hardened extruder gears. It's got a custom nozzle on it. I built an enclosure for it. And as good as it was, I bought a bamboo P1S and that immediately replaced it for speed and quality and ease of use and everything in between. And now I have a mini print farm. I have three P1Ss, all of which have diamondback nozzles on them. So cleanest running, cleanest extruding nozzle you can possibly get on a 3D printer. It's $100, but 100 times worth it if you don't have one. Are you putting like compositive fibers and stuff like that in there? Like an engineering fiber? Yeah, I do a lot of composites. I do a lot of glass fill PETG. It's my favorite filament. It takes all the good things about PETG where it's slightly flexible, but it can't do overhangs. It fixes the overhang problem. It's better than PLA because PLA, while it's very hard, it's also very brittle. PETG has some flex to it, but now it's also extremely rigid in multiple directions. And so it's a great filament. And I run that through all the time. And it's fantastic. Yeah, no, it's been fun to explore. It's funny because I think everybody starts out doing the same thing. I have this Elgato face cam that's on my computer, and the mount for it is on the bottom. And I really wanted it to be on the back just because of the way my desk is laid out. Yeah So I just like the first thing I did was just design a right angle thing with a couple of holes in it jam some some some screw mounts in there And now all of a sudden the problem that has been annoying me for three years is solved And now I'm starting to move on to other stuff. Like I'm going to do some concrete casting. Anyway, we'll talk about that on a future episode. I haven't done concrete casting, but that's been on my list. So, yeah. Look, I've been doing prototypes and learning how to do interface materials. Here's a sneak preview. Don't look at this. But it's my wife's a Valkyries fan. so we're making mother's day mother's day gnomes is the idea um but we'll see how that goes uh we'll report back on a future episode i guess um i think i think so she's into the games like the only thing i've played recently outside of like the obvious stuff like fortnite and call of duty that just aren't gonna work um because of of uh anti-cheat mostly is uh marathon just is like that Bungie doesn't like doing Linux compatible anti-cheat it seems. No. And, and, and that is the biggest thing. Um, uh, so we installed Linux on both the upstairs desktops. And in fact, we have a third one that's going to go up there. Um, and, uh, while I'm a hundred percent fine with Linux gaming and I've been doing it for a number of years now, um, I was a little questionable on whether or not all of her games would be compatible. And as it turns that they are uh she plays games like banner lords she does um uh jurassic park evolution the park building oh yeah that game yeah she does a lot of that um she plays a lot of simple games stardew valley and things like uh but i also recently valley is not a simple game no it is not yeah i mean like graphically simple yeah technically maybe but yeah yeah look you want all those people to like you you got to do a lot of work okay yes uh leah my love yeah um but uh i also recently got her into crab champions uh and what's funny is she's never been like a shooter fan at all and we've been playing crab champions a couple times a week now fantastic and so yeah she's starting to get into like some more intensive games and i never thought she'd be a fan of a bullet hell game but here we are. Now, my sister also lives with us and she plays a lot of games that we thought wouldn't be compatible either. I've played Red Dead Redemption 2 and she's recently gotten into that and she goes, oh yeah, that works just fine. I can fire that up and that's great. She plays some gotcha games though and those turn out to be also non-starters. I know Infinity Nikki was a no-go. Don't judge. She also plays Uma. It's the horse girl racing game. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's a giant bomb by storm last year. It's all. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No judgment. But she loves that one. She's got a streak going. And that one didn't launch. It kind of like loaded a white screen and then kicked out. And as we found out, it's the anti-cheat. Now, Uma is compatible with the Steam Deck, but only the Steam Deck. For some reason, the developers decided to put a flag in that if you're running on a Steam Deck, will allow you to run on Linux. But if you're running on any other version of Linux, it kicks you out. So I've seen games that use DeNovo do that before. I wonder if you can do the Steam Deck. What is it? Steam Deck equals one or something in the command line in Steam and it works. But then you're stuck at 1280 by 800. I did try that and it did not work. No love. Okay. Boo. Have you introduced either of them to the ProtonDB yet? Are you sending them out on their own to find their own? Are you teaching them to fish or are you fishing for them, Jeff? I am not fishing for them. I did teach my wife that, you know, download your game, open Steam, download the game, and hit play. And if it doesn't play, here's a couple tweaks that you can make on your own. You can go to the compatibility list and you can try a different version of Proton. You know, try to stick to something eight and higher. You know, usually you're going to have pretty good luck there. I didn't show her ProtonDB, but she also hasn't had to ask about any game yet. She installs the games and they've all just worked. Yeah, yeah. Have you – are you running them – are they running out of GameScope or are they running on the desktop mode? Just the Steam native client. Okay. But like in desktop or in the different session? In desktop. In desktop. In desktop. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so that's the next thing I want to do is I think I'm going to set up a session locally that's a Steam native client session on my desktop machine just so that I can like mode shift between work and games and kind of separate them a little bit more and maybe get a little bit more hoist out of the computer on the game scope mode. Although I actually don't know how that runs on NVIDIA these days. I'm still on NVIDIA on my desktop. So I feel like I feel like it should be fine, but probably not because NVIDIA's drivers are weird and janky. It does work. There is a little bit of a hit. Like you'll notice games run probably about 10 percent slower. Oh, really? Yeah. It's it's not overly dramatic, especially if you have like a decent like if you're rocking like a 4070, you're not going to notice. Yeah. if you're you're scraping the bottom of the barrel like you've got a 2060 yeah 10% is a big deal these days yeah yeah so your mileage may vary but I've had pretty good luck well that's fantastic I think I think this is as good a place as any to wrap it up let's take one more quick break from our sponsors and we'll be right back to close out the show Jeff from craft computing has been a delightful having you here thank you so much for taking the time and coming by and chatting with me and and and sharing like the stuff that you're like what are you excited about in linux this is this is the question i should ask everyone and i don't i don't really oh here's oh um the thing i'm most excited for in linux is is actually kind of left field but also kind of not it is actually the steam frame and that fex compatibility layer that's coming for the x86 to arm translation um that i think is going to dramatically change the way some of us play games um you're gonna just be full goggles all the time is that your thought or are you uh are you thinking about like arm laptops and stuff like that yeah i'm not even talking specifically about the steam frame i'm talking about what the impact of the steam frame and that level compatibility will be because Steam or Valve is porting SteamOS over to a native ARM device and then including x86 to ARM translation. They're going to run the Windows client or the Linux client, but with full compatibility for Windows or Linux or Android executables all in one device. Well, think of all those Android handhelds that have been proliferating the market for the last couple of years. some, you know, the AYN Thor and the AYA Neo and all these other devices that run ARM, you know, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, Gen 3 chips that could now all of a sudden have a Steam client that you can install your Windows games onto. And instead of paying $1,300 for a handheld, you can pay $350 for a handheld and be able to play these games. Yeah, I think out of all that Valve hardware announcement stuff that they did last year, the ARM translation layer was the thing that immediately grabbed me as, oh, it's also going to be great for Mac people, potentially, assuming the requirements on the ARM CPUs line up right. Yeah, the Apple people have been making really great strides on getting Metal to behave well with the translation layers because Vulkan is not a native API on Mac for whatever reason. God knows why, yeah. Yeah. But there's been really great strides with things like Game Hub getting Windows games compatible. Well, adding FECS to that is going to take out a huge amount of workload for getting those games compatible. There's also NVIDIA supposedly Computex Time coming out with the N1 and N1X APUs, which are essentially a GB10 or a DGX Spark, but made for the consumer market. Here is a ARM processor with 20 cores with an RTX 5070 level graphics card that runs ARM, but now you can play games on it if you wanted. That sounds like a wonderful client for your living room. Yeah. Or just a main gaming PC, I guess, right? Right. That's crazy. So, yeah, I can't wait to see the new types of devices that we're going to get that aren't simply AMD APUs or an Intel chip or whatever else. that there's going to be so much more variety and competition breeds innovation. And in the end, consumers win. The more choices we have, the better we usually end up coming out. So that's what I'm most excited for. I share your vision. I always loved seeing the weird stuff that came out of Shenzhen electronic markets. And opening that up to ARM processors instead of just x86 stuff is going to – you're absolutely right. That is that is it's a it's an exciting time to be a PC gamer, it turns out. Yeah. Well, Jeff, what do you have going on at Craft Computer right now? But do you have stuff to plug? This is the plugging section. Well, I just did another cloud gaming video this time on an Intel GPU. We split up the Intel Arc B70 Pro into multiple virtual gaming machines. And it wasn't perfect, but man, it is so close to perfect. Yeah, there's some there's some client level driver scheduling issues where certain games would not clock up the GPU. They would render, but they'd be rendering like 800 megahertz instead of 2800 megahertz. But for the most part, it was rock solid stable. And if you've ever watched any of my tutorials for getting like an NVIDIA card to bifurcate into a VM like this, it's like a multi-hour process to get the drivers installed and to get everything configured properly. There's so many dependencies upon, you know. This was install the card, enable SRIOV on the BIOS, and then tell the card in a single configuration file, I want you to split four ways. and it creates four virtual GPUs. And then you pass those through to the VMs and you're done. And then on the client side, on the VM side, you install the retail Intel graphics driver just from the website. From like inside the Windows VM. Yeah. And then it just works. That is wild. And like, it seems like to solve the clock, it seems like the clock problem is something that's relatively straightforward to fix. Yes, I think so. Two days before I filmed, this didn't work. And then all of a sudden there was a driver update and everything started working. And there's a couple little scheduling bugs to get worked out, but that's like the easiest part of all of this. And so, yeah. When you do that partitioning, does it allocate perf? Should it theoretically allocate perf to the VMs that are active? Not necessarily- Yes. The way GPU partitioning works is you're actually splitting up the memory amount. And so on a 32 gig card, if you say, I want four virtual GPUs, it'll create you four eight gigabyte GPUs. You know, the internet told me eight gigabyte GPUs are a waste of sand, Jeff. I'm sorry. Oh, totally. But here's the thing that happens, though, is each GPU can only access its partitioned amount of memory, but it has access to the full GPU core. And so if only one GPU is rendering, you get 100% of the GPU performance. Okay. And that scales dynamically. So it's time slicing the GPU, but physically dividing the memory. That's interesting. Yeah. Okay. And you have to do this on pro cards. You can't do this on consumer level cards, right? Correct. Yeah. Right now it's the Intel Arc pro card. So the B50, B60, B70 are the ones that currently support this. But there's hope that if demand is high enough, it'll eventually come to consumer cards or there'll be some little firmware driver hack that you can make work. I love a good firmware hack on a consumer level card. That's always good stuff. Jeff, where can people find you? Craft Computing. YouTube.com slash craft computing. You can find me on all the socials at craft computing. Usually I'm on blue sky, but yeah, come hang out. Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming by. We'll be back next week with a regularly scheduled episode of the dual book diaries. Make sure you check out Jeff's stuff over craft computing. It is fabulous. One of my, one of my, I love it. One of the new Jeff video pops up in my feed because it's always going to be something good. And I'm always going to learn some wild stuff. And we will be back next week with your fix of Linux talk. you can watch the full nerd on Tuesdays on the full nerd network on YouTube where we talk about PC hardware and guys in sheds building their own RAM did you see that video that guy's that guy we gotta have him on he's a mad scientist that was pretty crazy like I if you had said if you had asked me two weeks ago can you make your own RAM I'd be like no that's it no nobody can do that you need nobody's gonna make a clean room in their shed in their backyard but it turns out With the internet and some time and money, anything is possible. So, yeah, Full Nerd on Tuesdays. Expedition Handheld with Adam and Russ talking about all those little $300 handheld gaming devices on, I think, Fridays now, maybe Saturdays. I can't remember. And then Duplit Diaries once a week talking about Linux and occasionally Windows. And sometimes 3D printers, as it turns out. Yeah, and sometimes we have a little bit of an aside about 3D printers. but that's relevant because that software runs so well on Linux. I was so blown away. Yeah. Yeah. The bamboo studio in particular runs amazingly well on, on Linux and I can transfer all of my workload over there just like that. So, yeah, yeah, it's fantastic. So, okay. We'll be back next week. Thanks for watching. Thanks, Jeff. See y'all next time. Bye everybody. Bye guys. tweet