Since games don't have to run with more than user privileges and steam runs in flatpak, you could run them as a different user account with very limited permissions.

That said, flatpak should be pretty secure as far as I'm aware if you make sure that permissions for the apps running are restricted appropriately. I'm not sure how restricted you can make steam and still have it work though

You can use offline mode for steam if you're okay with steam having internet but not games. But there's no way to use steam entirely offline. Internet access is a fundamental part of the system they have.

There's also a question of what your threat model is. Like are you trying to prevent causal access of your files by games, or like a sophisticated attempt to compromise the system conveyed through a game. For the former flatpak seems sufficient. For the latter you probably need a dedicated machine. And there's varying levels in between

I think something that contributes to people talking past each other here is a difference in belief in how necessary/desirable revolution/overthrow of the U.S government is. Like many of the people who I've talked to online, who advocate not voting and are also highly engaged, believe in revolution as the necessary alternative. Which does make sense. It's hard to believe that the system is fundamentally genocidal and not worth working within (by voting for the lesser evil) without also believing that the solution is to overthrow that system.

And in that case, we're discussing the wrong thing. Like the question isn't whether you should vote or not . it's whether the system is worth preserving (and of course what do you do to change it. How much violence in a revolution is necessary/acceptable). Like if you believe it is worth preserving, then clearly you should vote. And if you believe it isn't, there's stronger case for not voting and instead working on a revolution.

Does anyone here believe that revolution isn't necessary and also that voting for the lesser isn't necessary?

The opposite is more plausible to me: believing in the necessity of revolution while also voting

Personally I believe that revolution or its attempt is unlikely to effective and voting+activism is more effective, and also requires agreement from fewer people in order to progress on its goals. Tragically, this likely means that thousands more people will be murdered, but I don't know what can actually be effective at stopping that.

I'm not sure what performance improvements you're talking about. As far as I'm aware, the difference between distros on performance is extremely minimal. What does matter is how up to date the DE is in the distribution provided package. For example, I wanted some nvidia+Wayland improvements that were only in kwin 6.1, and so I switched from kubuntu to neon in order to get them (and also definitely sacrificed some stability since more broken packages/combinations get pushed to users than in base ubuntu). It's also possible that the kernel version might matter in some cases, but I haven't run into this personally.

I think the main differences between distros is how apps are packaged and the defaults provided, and if you're most comfortable with apt based systems, I'm not sure what benefit there's going to be to switching (other than the joy in tinkering and learning something new, which can be fun in its own right).

For some users less experienced with linux, the initial effort required to setup Ubuntu for gaming (installing graphics drivers/possibly setting kernel options, etc) might push someone toward a distribution that removes that barrier, but the end state is going to be basically identical to whatever you've setup yourself.

The choice between distributions is probably more 'what do I want the process to getting to my desired end state to be like' and less 'how do I want the computer to run'.

I feel like this really depends on what hardware you have access too. What are you interested in doing?How long are you willing to wait for it to generate, and how good do you want it to be?

You can pull off like 0.5 word per second of one of the mistral models on the CPU with 32GB of RAM. The stabediffusion image models work okay with like 8-16GB of vram.

I'd be surprised if it was significantly less. A comparable 70 billion parameter model from llama requires about 120GB to store. Supposedly the largest current chatgpt goes up to 170 billion parameters, which would take a couple hundred GB to store. There are ways to tradeoff some accuracy in order to save a bunch of space, but you're not going to get it under tens of GB.

These models really are going through that many Gb of parameters once for every word in the output. GPUs and tensor processors are crazy fast. For comparison, think about how much data a GPU generates for 4k60 video display. Its like 1GB per second. And the recommended memory speed required to generate that image is like 400GB per second. Crazy fast.

Chatgpt is also probably around 50-100GB at most

I use qdirstat a lot to determine what files are eating all my space

This is one reason I'm switching away from pla+ back to normal pla. The esun pla+ really seems to get brittle when held under stress. This is an issue with printed parts as well. I've had parts suddenly crack in half where they were stressed over a few months.

Also it's really annoying when little bits of filament get stuck in your filament guide tube :(

There's definitely software that uses parts of the windows API that games don't touch. And doesn't work properly on Wine. I keep a windows install around just for using an analysis software for some lab equipment that refuses to start in wine.

Things like CAD software are also a struggle, though the latest wine seems to have resolved a number of graphics issues with getting PTC Creo to properly use the nvapi and nvidia graphics drivers through wine.

While wine is amazing, plenty of things don't work with it. Usually you don't need them, but if you do, you do

Mine has a setting to not send more than one notification within X minutes I under settings > notifications > app notifications > some app > minimum time between notification sounds

How many internet service providers would have to go along before the internet was effectively off? 3? 4?

Firefox PWAs seem to work for me on mobile. To be fair I'm on nightly, but I can see a menu item that says "install" if the webpage has a PWA manifest. I was using voyager with it for a while before they released the play store version.