It’s an engineering sample that was produced before the final product was available. They use the really early ones to figure out if what they got back from the fab actually runs and how fast it will go safely. Later ones end up at motherboard partners so they can test their new board designs.

It is pretty common for them to leak out onto the second hand market after the final release. I’ve never heard of one that had any real problems, but in theory you might be buying something that has some issue that they hadn’t discovered at that point.

I’ve changed distro’s a bunch of times personally and for business I have influence in a bunch of times in the last 30 odd years.

Slackware -> Redhat -> Suse -> Ubuntu -> Debian.

The reasons for each were ( as best I can recall ).

Slackware to Redhat was just because a proper package manager made sense at the time. I think the Redhat releases were a bit more up to date too.

Redhat to Suse was because Redhat stopped doing the free long term releases, the short term ones were too short to be workable.

Suse to Ubuntu was a similar thing to Redhat with Suse trying to push you into the enterprise version.

Ubuntu to Debian most recently was due to the Ubuntu releases coming with more and more unwanted crap, we had been running mint on desktops to avoid whatever their mutant gnome reskin was called and then their regular gnome releases, but we were still running regular Ubuntu on servers. Eventually when they started putting pretty core stuff in snaps we decided to move to Debian.

Hopefully that is the last migration we have to do for a while.

Razer mice and keyboards can be managed with openrazer under Linux. I still use deathadders on a few Linux machines ( and one Windows games PC ) but I’ve ditched my razer keyboards for keychron which don’t really need any software. You can configure the RGB components of them all with openrgb if you want in Linux and Windows.

Yeah, I reckon having a split of the frontend and the backend results in about half the complexity in each. If you have multiple frontends you can upgrade whatever the least important one is to see if there are any problems

I didn’t really answer your original question.

When I was using NUC’s I was using Linux mint which uses cinnamon by default as the window manager. Originally I changed it to use some really minimal window manager like twm, but then at some point it became practical to not use one at all and just run kodi directly on X.

If I was going back to a Linux frontend I’d probably evaluate libreELEC as it has alot of the sharp edges sorted out.

I used to run kodi on linux on intel NUC’s connected to all our TV’s a while ago. I don’t remember it being particularly unreliable. The issue that made me change that setup was hardware decoding support in 4k for newer codecs.

What I’ve had doing that frontend function ( kodi, jellyfin, disney plus, netflix etc ) for the last few years is three Nvidia shield TV pro’s which have been absolutely awesome. They are an old product now and I suspect Nvidia are too busy making money to work on a newer generation version of them,

The biggest surprise improvement was how good it was being able to ( easily ) configure their remotes to generate power on / off and volume up and down IR codes for the TV or the AV amp they were using so you only need a single remote.

Separating the function of the backend out from the frontend in the lounge has reduced the broken mess that happens around OS upgrades drastically.

I replaced mythtv with tvheadend on the backend and kodi on the frontend like 5 or 6 years ago.

The setup and configuration at the time on mythtv was slanted towards old ( obsolete ) analog tuners and static setup and tvheadend was like a breath of fresh air in comparison where you could point it at a DVB mux or two and it would mostly do what you want without having to fight it.

I’m not sure how much longer I’ll want something that can tune DVB-S2 and DVB-T though. Jellyfin and friends handle everything other than legacy TV better than kodi these days.

The most impressed I’ve been with hardware encoding and decoding is with the built in graphics on my little NUC.

I’m using a NUC10i5FNH which was only barely able to transcode one vaguely decent bitrate stream in software. It looked like passing the hardware transcoding through to a VM was too messy for me so I decided to reinstall linux straight on the hardware.

The hardware encoding and decoding performance was absolutely amazing. I must have opened up about 20 jellyfin windows that were transcoding before I gave up trying and called it good enough. I only really need about 4 maximum.

The graphics on the 10th generation NUC’s is the same sort of thing that is on the 9th gen and 10th gen desktop cpu’s, so if you have and intel cpu with onboard graphics give it a try.

It’s way less trouble than the last time I built a similar setup with NVidia. I haven’t tried a Radeon card yet, but the jellyfin docs are a bit more negative about AMD.

I just read the update to the post saying that the issue has been narrowed down to the NTFS driver. I haven’t used NTFS on linux since the NTFS fuse driver was brand new and still wonky as hell something like 15 years ago, so I don’t know much about it.

However, it sounds like the in kernel driver was still pretty fresh in 5.15, so doing as you have suggested and trying out a 6.5 kernel instead is a pretty good call.

If you haven’t already, try running hdparm on your drive to get an idea of if the drives are at least doing large raw reads straight off the disk at an appropriate performance level.

This is output from the little NUC I’m using right now:

# lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2   8:2    0 464.3G  0 part /
└─sda3   8:3    0   976M  0 part [SWAP]

# hdparm -i /dev/sda

/dev/sda:

 Model=Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB, FwRev=RVT02B6Q, SerialNo=S3YANB0KB24583B
...

# hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1526 MB in  3.00 seconds = 508.21 MB/sec

If your results are really poor for this test then it points more at the drive / cable / controller / linux controller driver.

If the results are okay, then the issue is probably something more like a logical partitioning / filesystem driver issue.

I’m not sure what a good benchmark application for Linux that tests the filesystem layer as well is other than bonnie++ which has been around forever. Someone else might have a more current idea of something to use for this.

It might help for the folks here to know which brand and model of SSDs you have, what sort of sata controllers the sata ones are plugged into and what sort of cpu and motherboard the nvme one is connected to.

What I can say is Ubuntu 22.04 doesn’t have some mystery problem with SSDs. I work in a place where we have in the order of 100 Ubuntu 22.04 installs running with SSDs, all either older intel ones or newer samsung ones. They go great.

Agreed, it seems like they should have put just a little bit more in the standard feature set so every little window manager doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Appreciate the reply. Which desktop environment are you using?

My only experience with Wayland is also with KDE. Wheres for the 27-ish years before that I’ve used all sorts of stuff with X.

I’ve scripted the machine that drives the frontend for our video surveilance ssytem to place windows exactly where I want them when it comes up.

I use a couple of dbus triggers that make the TV on the wall in my garage go to sleep from the shell, perhaps not tested via ssh though. They were pretty well the functional equivalent of some xset dpms commands that I used to use. Not sure if that is what you were meaning. I think I also had something working that disabled the output altogether. I think that was pretty clunky as it used some sort of screen ID that would occasionally change. Sorry I’m hazy on the details, I’m old.

I’ll try it all out when I get home, I’ve got to find some old serial crap for a coworker in the garage anyway.

Which workflows? Asking because I’d like to experiment with some edge case stuff.

I’m running KDE with wayland on multiple different vintage machines with AMD and intel graphics and it would take alot for me to go back to the depressing old mess that was X.

The biggest improvement in recent times was absolutely pulling out all my Nvidia cards and putting in second hand Radeon cards, but switching to wayland fixed all the dumb interactions between VRR ( and HDR ) capable monitors of mixed refresh rates.

Even the little NUC that drives the three 4k TV’s for the security cameras at work is a little happier with wayland, running for weeks now with hardware decoding, rather than X crashing pretty well every few days.

Last week I did an install of Debian 12 on a little NUC7CJYH to use for web browsing and ssh sessions into work and ended up with wayland by default. Seems to work great.

From what I have experienced, it goes great with intel integrated graphics, great with a radeon card and can be made to work with Nvidia if you are lucky or up for a fight.

I have an A1502 Macbook that I have been using for work since it was new in 2014. It triple boots Windows, Linux and OSX, but I only really use Linux.

Mine has the same CPU, a i5-4308U but 16GB of memory, I think it was a custom order at the time.

If I recall I did the regular bootcamp process you would do to install Windows, installed Windows on a subset of the free space and Linux on the rest.

I’ve got Linux mint 21 on it currently, but I have had vanilla Ubuntu at different times. I can’t think of anything on it that doesn’t just work off hand.

Your bridge isn’t bridging properly. If Router B is sending a destination unreachable then the packets are being handled on it further up the stack at layer 3 by some sort of routing component rather than by a layer 2 bridging one.

I’ve been using Linux for something like 27 years, I wouldn’t say evangelical or particularly obsessed.

I started using it because some of the guys showing up to my late 90’s LAN parties were dual booting Slackware it and it had cool looking boot up messages compared to DOS or Windows at the time. The whole idea of dual booting operating systems was pretty damn wild to me at the time too.

After a while it became obvious to me that Slackware '96 was way more reliable than DOS or Windows 95 at the time, a web browser like Netscape could take out the whole system pretty easily on Windows, but when Netscape crashed on Linux, you opened up a shell and killed off whatever was left of it and started a new one.

I had machines that stayed up for years in the late 90’s and that was pretty well impossible on Windows.

Often on Linux group membership changes only take effect on login. So you could try logging out of your session and logging back in after your group changes to test that theory out.

The context of this post is Linux on AMD cards, is there any support at all for raytracing or upscaling of any sort on Linux on either AMD or Nvidia? Serious question.

I’ve been running Linux for 100% of my productive work since about 1995. Used to compile every kernel release and run it for the hell of it from about 1998 until something like 2002 and work for a company that sold and supported Linux servers as firewalls and file servers etc.

I had used et4000’s, S3 968’s and trio 64’s, the original i740, Matrox g400’s with dual CRT monitors and tons of different Nvidia GPU’s throughout the years and hadn’t had a whole lot of trouble.

The Nvidia Linux driver made me despair for desktop Linux for the last few years. Not enough to actually run anything different, but it did seem like things were on a downward slide.

I had weird flashing of sections of other windows when dragging a window around. Individual screens that would just start flashing sometimes. Chunky slideshow window dragging when playing video on another screen. Screens re-arranging themselves in baffling orientations after the machine came back from the screen being locked. I had crap with the animation rate running at 60hz on three 170hz monitors because I also had a TV connected to display network graphs ( that update once a minute ). I must have reset up the panels on cinnamon, or later on KDE a hundred times because they would move to another monitor, sometimes underneath a different one or just disappeared altogether when I unlocked the screen. My desktop environment at home would sometimes just freeze up if the screen was DPMS blanked for more than a couple of hours requiring me to log in from another machine and restart X. I had two different 6gb 1060’s and a 1080ti in different machines that would all have different combinations of these issues.

I fixed maybe half of the issues that I had. Loaded custom EDID on specific monitors to avoid KDE swapping them around, did wacky stuff with environment variables to change the sync behaviour, used a totally different machine ( a little NUC ) to drive the graphs on the TV on the wall.

Because I had got bit pretty hard by the Radeon driver being a piece of trash back in something like 2012, I had the dated opinion that the proprietary Nvidia driver was better than the Radeon driver. It wasn’t til I saw multiple other folks adamant that the current amdgpu driver is pretty good that I bought some ex-mining AMD cards to try them out on my desktop machines. I found out that most of the bugs that were driving me nuts were just Nvidia bugs rather than xorg or any other Linux component. KDE also did a bunch of awesome work on multi monitor support which meant I could stop all the hackery with custom EDIDs.

A little after that I built a whole new work desktop PC with an AMD GPU ( and CPU FWIW ) . It has been great. I’m down from about 15 annoying bugs to none that I can think of offhand running KDE. It all feels pretty fluid and tight now without any real work from a fresh install.