This is a relatively new CPU. You might struggle on Ubuntu as well. As much as I love Debian, something like Fedora might be better.

It may be possible to get Debian running, though - either run Debian Testing or install a Backports kernel and Mesa. Were you failing to boot Debian, or did you just struggle after getting it installed?

Either way, I just don’t recommend Ubuntu.

A suggestion: if you can’t find anything else for them, keep them around as parts machines.

There should still be useful components in them. For instance, a lot of the Wi-Fi modems may still be perfectly good for other things as long as they’re mini-PCIE (I don’t know if they use those in desktops). They may not be the absolute newest standard, but should still do the trick; it certainly came in handy when my sister’s laptop’s Wi-Fi modem decided to be a brat - I just swapped in an Intel modem from a laptop from 2016.

I might not fully trust the SSDs or the HDDs, but they can still have their uses. There’s one SSD from an old desktop that I currently have hooked up to my Wii U.

From what I can tell, people have supposedly run LLMs on it with not great, but not necessarily horrible results; Certainly has to be better than those clickbait posts about people running llama on Windows 98.

A lot of budget desktops from the past decade can at least match, if not significantly outclass a Raspberry Pi 5. Heck, that barely beats my i5 from 2009, and the performance of CPUs has increased significantly since then.

Then again, I’m not particular interested in gen ML, self-hosted or not, so I don’t really care.

Although seem to have solved your main issue, I have a few comments on your Steam Run command.

For one, I think VK_DRIVER_FILES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.x86_64.json and your prime-run command are redundant - both of those will do the same thing. Personally, I use neither of those and instead do something like DRI_PRIME=1 %command% (obviously not this exactly always, as there might be other flags, but roughly the idea).

In general, I’d just recommend seeing which of these command flags you really need, because I see people in ProtonDB getting away with much simpler launch commands.

Every package manager you mention is shit.

Every package manager you mention is s***.

For the record, I rationally hate AI*, and this title already raises suspicion for me.

“AI” is a buzzword, and seeing it in the title or slogan for project or product reeks of some business major jumping on a bandwagon that they don’t truly understand, and where there’s business majors, there’s probably encrapification.

*: Of course, one of the big problems is “AI” is a misnomer - there’s no “Intelligence” to it. “ML” is closer to capturing the nature of the technology without ascribing to it some magic power that it doesn’t have.

How old are these machines, from oldest CPU model to newest CPU model?

I mean, depending on the budget desktop, it might be much better than a Raspberry Pi 5, which I hear is already occasionally used for such things.

I think I have a bit more nuanced feelings on the MIT license. If I actually write something useful, GPL all the way, baby!

However, I don’t necessarily think the MIT license is the embodiment of evil; I find GPL a bit overkill for hobby projects. I’m not talking things that have the potential to become critical pieces of infrastructure like a kernel or something; I’m more talking about emoji pickers or hacky little Python scripts that would be pretty useless to a Fortune 500. In the minute chance someone actually cares about my silly little toy to fork it, I see very little point in encumbering it with the full heft of a copyleft license and stopping them from doing whatever the heck they want.

Assuming this is an ATX or ITX PC, there’s likely a way to reset UEFI so you can disable fastboot and change your settings, or at least boot from a recovery USB.

There’s usually something like a button or 2 pins you can short on your motherboard to reset the settings. If your machine has dual BIOS, there will be a switch you can flip, though you’ll probably need to update the UEFI again once you do that.

In the worst case (and this should work on almost any device), remove the CMOS battery, let the device sit for a few minutes, then put that battery in. That should clear all settings, including fastboot, and allow you to do recovery stuff - just make sure you fix the time before going on the internet.

Just to make sure - it’s not some cable hitting a fan in a case, right?

I’ve seen systems before where a cable is too close to a fan, and you don’t hear a noise until the fan speeds up.

Usually, you don’t need to bother much with drivers at all outside of Nvidia GPUs and Broadcom modems since the kernel is monolithic and contains most drivers.

On an ATX motherboard, I think it’s extremely rare for the ethernet chipset to require an out-of-kernel driver.

Honestly, even AMD to Intel would probably go mostly fine, considering the monolithic nature of the kernel and it having most drivers built in.

You’d probably want to make sure you have the Intel firmware package installed and make sure to remove configs specific to AMD stuff, like power management configs and kernel parameters, but it would still most likely boot.

Honestly, probably no. You’re switching to something with the same CPU generation and micro architecture, and the boards are by the same manufacturer with the same mobo chipset generation (both 5xx). It should be plug and play.

The only major change I can see the old CPU has an iGPU, while the new one doesn’t, meaning that you won’t be able to use the video port built into your motherboard, only the ports on your GPU. I’m guessing you probably weren’t using that HDMI port in the first place, so it’s probably non-issue.

EDIT: There is a small chance you’ll have to change your fstab depending on how it’s configured; if it’s done by drive UUID, it won’t be a problem.

Replace the Macbook with a Thinkpad.

I think I made the mistake of pushing my grandfather away from Linux. He’s retired but does some professional photography; he’s used Photoshop for years, but said he’s open to leaving Adobe.

One day recently, he told me he heard about “this Linux thing” and asked me if it would be a good fit and run Windows applications well. I told him his main issue was probably Photoshop, and that even switching, he’d still need some stable, consistent way to open past PSD files. In retrospect, maybe I should have looked more closely at his use case to see the complexity of his edits and if they might have worked well in another program that runs on Linux.

I think for the MS Office thing, it depends on what it’s being used for. If it’s just creating a fresh document or editing a simple existing docx, LibreOffice it totally fine; I’ve heavily exclusively used LibreOffice Writer during my time in college and been okay, as I’m either just writing in MLA or using a provided Word file that I can then just save as an ODT after initial conversion and export as a PDF when it comes time to turn it in.

However, from what I can tell, if you’re working in an organization that extensively uses MS Office, files may need to survive multiple openings and edits between multiple editors, and multiple cycles of translating between document representations can lead to degraded documents and just make your work life absolutely miserable. Thus, LibreOffice isn’t an option, though I hear there are more MS-compatible suites that are usable on Linux, though not all of them FOSS.

This is why I’ve so far left my mother alone about Linux; maybe if I saw some evidence that her workflow would be more amenable to LibreOffice than I think it is, I’d reconsider.

I usually format my external drives to exFAT since it’s fully supported R/W on all major operating systems, in the slim chance I have to use macOS.

Still, no need for the OP to reformat their drive; NTFS tends to work just fine.

I agree with other people that you should futz around with your GPU drivers and different Wayland compositors first, but also, if you ever had to reinstall, there is such thing as saving your dotfiles to significantly reduce setup time.

I don’t do that because I’m lazy, but it certainly is a thing

For reference, sharing your local IP address is a little like saying “I’m in room 223” (local IP address) and not saying what building (network) you’re in. Someone can’t walk into 223 in a different building and get to the same room you’re in.

Honestly, even if someone knew what network you were on, a local IP address wouldn’t be that useful because even if they successfully got on your network, as long as you have a properly-configured firewall and no vulnerable network-exposed services on your system, they can’t really do anything.

Honestly, while it’s still not a bright idea to tempt fate like that, even sharing your public IP isn’t that bad for the same reasons if it’s a competent home user; the worst that can happen on a properly-configured network is that someone tries and fails to exploit vulnerabilities that aren’t there and MAYBE drum up your internet bill. Also, for most ISPs, your public IP changes pretty often anyway, usually something like every few days to a week, due to changing DHCP leases.