yup, the syntax is (from within the distrobox)

distrobox-export --app appname

Run Arch in a distrobox, done (in atomic you lean hard on distrobox and flatpak).

Yup, OP has done his time in Arch meaning now competent, probably, time to go to Fedora and relax, close enough to the edge but not bleeding, good QA, For extra chill go atomic, check out uBlue…

I do it with a gluetun container (more versatile) zero issues, but you can just mainline wireguard as an interface if you prefer, also works fine, on bazzite.

Thinkpads have long had first tier linux support, in fact many models have shipped with linux for at least a decade (?), checking that is a really good way to be sure, but you’re going to be fine with W, P, T, X lines, many enthusiasts make light work. They were deployed (might still be) to Red Hat kernel devs for a long time, which helps things along. Fingerprint drivers tend to be proprietary and hit or miss, but passwords work.

Honestly learning to install linux yourself, and configure it to your liking, is actually, imo, a really important path to learning and you’re likely doing yourself a disservice avoiding it. It’s part of the avoidance of vendor lock in you want. Installation is surprisingly easy now, start with something simple, Mint is often recommended these days, find a decent, recent, youtube and you’ll probably be up and running in an hour. Find the apps you need for your workflow (which will take considerably longer). Get familiar with the terminal. Best thing you can do after that is burn it down and install a new distro, leaving any mistakes behind, keeping your list of apps. Arch if you want to get really deep into it, or Fedora / Bazzite are good choices and very stable. Best of luck.

You can cycle the smaller drives to cold backup, that’s not a waste. You do have backups, which RAID is not, right?

Sure, works fine for inference with tensor parallelism, USB4 / thunderbolt 4/5 is a better (40Gbit+ and already there) bet than ethernet (see distributed-llama). Trash for training / fine tuning, that needs higher inter GPU speed, or better a bigger GPU VRAM.

Yeah, I have a broader view of the phrase, which includes complacency (not actively working at alternatives) as well as just voting, seems most agree with you.

Valid point.

many people believe that “funding” something equals to “controlling” it.

Pretty much the definition of soft power, which an awful lot of politicians believe in.

US funding having been a toxic source of dependency, and it being better in the long run to get money elsewhere.

Yup, pretty much my intent, that and the insecurity it engenders, rather surprised by the reaction.

How could you read it that way ? I’m saying eventually they were going to conflict with the interests of the US (oligarchs and techbros) and lose funding. Shocker, it happened under cheeto.

Not a good thing, just an inevitable one, as they conflict with the interests of the US (oligarchs and techbros).

Oh No ! Leopards Ate My Face.

Better off in the long run.

Seems like data integrity is your highest priority, and you’re doing pretty well, the next step is keeping a copy offsite. It’s the 3-2-1 backup strategy, 3 copies, 2 media (used to mean CDs etc but now think offline drives) 1 offsite (in case of fire, meteor strike etc), so look to that, stash a copy at a friends or something.

In your case I’d look at getting some online storage to fill the offsite role while you’re overseas (paid probably, but a year of 1 or 2 Tb is quite reasonable) leaving you with no pressure on the selfhosting side, just tailscale in, muck around and have fun, and if something breaks, no harm done, data safe.

I’ve done it for what seems like forever and I’d still be worried about leaving a system out of physical control for any extended period of time, at the very least having someone to reboot it if connectivity or power fails will be invaluable, but talking them through a broken update is another thing entirely, and you shouldn’t make that a critical necessity, too much stress.

I say go for the desktop for grunty work and pick up an older thinkpad for the mobile use case or just remote in with your macbook. I have a T580 (last of the dual batteries, infinite battery life baby), works an absolute treat on linux and next best build quality to a macbook but with a repair manual and massive upgradeability.

IMO, same reason they have their own repo, which eventually feeds into Red Hat enterprise, to have a trustworthy, curated set of safe (ish) software that’s had eyeballs on it. A worthy enough goal, but that said, it applies a lot less to flatpaks. I personally used to remove theirs because I didn’t like having multiple sources, now I’m on Bazzite which ships with flathub.

Don’t sleep on switching to nvme.

The old adage is never use v x.0 of anything, which I’d expect to go double for data integrity. Is there any particular reason ZFS gets a pass here (speaking as someone who really wants this feature). TrueNAS isn’t merging it for a couple of months yet, I believe.

Yup (although minutes seems long and depending on usage weekly might be fine). You can also combine it with updates which require going down anyway.