You can’t - usually, depending on the license - just repackage OSS and sell it.

I’m pretty sure you can. GNU’s Selling Free Software is for the GPL & doesn’t specifically address selling someone else’s OSS. But you should (I think?) be able to, so long as you don’t violate the license. There are multiple views to selling foss, but I don’t think that many will object, if you for example sell Linux DVDs at a low cost. (Not common any more, but this has been done before, I’ve heard)

I don’t know much about Zorin, but selling foss is not inherently evil & illegal.

I’m not sure if my brain counts as artificial, but with all the microplastics, it sure ain’t organic.

I’m very comfortable with emulators.

A way out & Cuphead were great. Would be nice to go back to get the remaining achievements. Who won when you played A Way Out?

How’s couch co-op these days? From what I remember, it’s more common in older console games.

Do you have any recommendations, retro or otherwise?

I think I understand your point. Personally, I use a desktop for gaming and a laptop for a most other things, like you used to. I use tiling WMs, so not having a real mouse is not so bad, but I prefer real keyboards.

I don’t think you need to move a gaming machine around that often and desktops have better thermals, are a lot more upgradeable and are easier to fix than laptops.

But sometimes portable gaming can be nice. For example, I play Mario Kart (Double Dash, of course) with my father every now and then, which wouldn’t really work with a desktop. It’s nice to be able to take a laptop and a few bluetooth controllers with me and be able to set up a portable retro gaming station literally anywhere.

I guess it’s just up to individual preference.

Just out of curiosity, why would you recommend a gaming laptop instead of a desktop?

Nvidia user here.

What kinds of problems did you face with AMD?

While Nvidia works pretty well now, it just doesn’t compare to my laptop with an intel iGPU, with which I’ve had no issues. Intel & AMD should offer a better out of the box experience.

It does depend on your GPU, distro & use, but in the best case scenario Nvidia will only match the alternatives and in the worst case you’ll have to tinker a bit, which new Linux users may not be comfortable with.

I haven’t had any new Nvidia-related issues in about a year, but I spent more time than I would’ve liked fixing those issues a year ago. I’m really curious about your experience with AMD if it was so horrible and left you longing for “how stable things were on the green team”.

I’m not saying OP should get one over the other, but OP shouldn’t let fanboys dictate their decision. They will try to do so without admitting that they’re fanboys, so we have to admit it for them.

TL;DR: Nvidia works well for most people, but can cause headaches for others.

While Nvidia GPUs mostly work pretty well, that’s only until they don’t. I’d recommend getting an AMD one instead, to avoid any future headaches. Though, if you prefer Nvidia for some reason, the situation will likely get better when the Nova driver gets released & NVK becomes a bit more optimized.

Nova is still in the very early stages of development, though I think they’ve laid down a lot of the groundwork now? They recently got the driver to do one part of the GPU initalization process, so work on the driver proper has started.

In the strictest sense, NVK is not a replacement for Nouveau’s OpenGL driver, but Zink on NVK is, as NVK is exclusively a Vulkan driver and Nouveau has no support for Vulkan.

I remember there being a bit of talk around a Linux driver compatibility layer for Redox in the future, but I can’t find anything about it, so I could be misremembering.

What do you mean by “C interoperability and a linux-like API”, exactly?

1. C is pretty much the standard for FFI, you can use C libraries with Rust and Redox even has their own C standard library implementation.
2. Linux does not have a stable kernel API as far as I know, only userspace API & ABI compatibility is guaranteed.

Does it have to be Linux? Some greybeards are pretty opposed to it. I wonder if it would be easier to make our own theme park kernel with blackjack and hookers memory and thread safety, like Redox.

At least the situation will get better.

Nouveau’s kernel driver is a horrible mess, so I’m looking forward to Nova, if it ever gets ready.

For older (pre-about-RTX 2000-series) cards, the kernel driver had to do a lot, and Nouveau had to reverse engineer most things. Now, Nvidia has moved most of the proprietary magic into something called the GSP (GPU System Processor), which is a small processor (RISC-V, IIRC) which does many things the kernel driver did previously, like reclocking. This, in addition to the official open kernel drivers should make developing a new FOSS Nvidia driver a lot easier. RedHat’s Nova (and I think Nvidia’s open driver) only support cards with a GSP for this reason.

NVK is very impressive for such a new unofficia Nvidia driver in my opinion. If I remember correctly, they said that they’ll focus more on optimization now that it’s conformant.

When/if Nova is ready, it will finally be possible to use a Rust graphics driver stack on Linux outside of Asahi.

If you have any questions remaining, just ask.

Edit: So the closed source GSP firmware blob has 3 “good” points:

1. The closed source parts are limited to inside the GPU.
2. It moves a lot of work away from the kernel driver.
3. It allows open source drivers to support HDMI 2.1 & later.

The HDMI Forum decided some time ago that HDMI was too open. Now, for the newer versions, the license doesn’t allow open source implementations. Nvidia gets around this with proprietary GSP firmware inside the GPU (even with official open source drivers, not sure about Nouveau) and Intel with GPU firmware or an internal adapter, depending on the GPU (if I’ve understood correctly). Only AMD doesn’t support the newest HDMI version.

They’ll still be slow, as I really doubt that anyone will manage to reclock the cards, ever. Hopefully, now that they’re supported by the NVK driver, which is likely getting a lot more attention than Nouveau’s OpenGL driver and supports Vullan, performance might improve.

According to Collabora (main developers of NVK, I think) & a few other sources (I haven’t run any benchmarks myself), NVK + Zink (OpenGL on Vulkan) is a bit faster than Nouveau on newer cards, for which it is now the default. The older cards still default to Nouveau, but as I understand it, it’s just in case there are issues with them.

So, they are a bit nore compatible now. They should also be a bit more performant now (if you use Vulkan instead of OpenGL & NVK works) or soon(er or later) (when NVK gets faster or the cards switch to Zink on NVK).

Nvidia drivers are a bit confusing on linux, so I’ll list them here, just in case (at leas as far as I understand them):
Kernel drivers:
Closed source official driver
Open source official driver
Nouveau Nova (WIP)

Userspace drivers:
Official driver (supports both officiql kernel drivers)
Nouveau (OpenGL only, supports the Nouveau kernel driver)
NVK (Vulkan only, OpenGL via Zink, supports the Nouveau kernel driver, will support Nova)

Kernel drivers run in the kernel & talk with the GPU, while userspace drivers talk with the kernel drivers, as far as I understand.

Both NVK & Nouveau’s userspace driver are part of Mesa.

All the Nouveau drivers are often just called “Nouveau”, but they’re all located in different places. (Nouveau also has a Xorg driver, which isn’t important here.) Also, the package for NVK is (at least on some distributions) called vulkan-nouveau (Arch) or similiar.

TL;DR: The situation should be at least a bit better now and it should be easier to improve. Also, Nvidia drivers on Linux are confusing.

P.S.
I have a device with an intel integrated GPU & one with a Nvidia 2000 series GPU. Everything works with the intel one (and I would assume AMD), but Nvidia sometimes causes problems on the other device.

It was some time since I tried NVK on it, but performance was much better with the official drivers. It’s probably much better now, and I’ll probably have time & motivation to test it in a week or few, after getting a few other things out of the way first.

Depending on your card, luck, setup, needs & distribution, Nvidia could just be a minor annoyance (enabling non-free repositories and/or some manual configuration with the official drivers, or not quite enough performance with Nouveau) to larger problems (broken greeter/DE/WM/etc., problems with secure boot signing or something else with the official driver or horrible performance or lack of support for extensions with Nouveau).

If you’re looking for a GPU, I’d recommend avoiding Nvidia. Official drivers work pretty well now (most of the time), but can cause headaches and the amount of time I’ve spent troubleshooting is not completely insignificant. There are still a few (pretty small) problems I haven’t been able to resolve. This is in contrast to the intel iGPU, with which I don’t remember any problems.

Edit/P.P.S.
Sorry for the wall of text.

It doesn’t say anything about performance. But they now support Vulkan with Nouveau, so it can now be used even if OpenGL is not available or broken.

The blog post only me tioned that the driver now supports the GPUs, which I think should be believable, as the GPUs are listed as conformant on Khronos’ website.

If you have had problems with a Wayland compositor when using Nouveau with one of the cards, it is possible that it might work now, if the compositor supports Vulkan.

Vulkan is normally faster than OpenGL, but I don’t know much about the state of NVK & Nouveau’s OpenGL driver for the cards. I just know the API versions they support and that NVK cannot reclock them if Nouveau can’t, so I can’t say anything about performance.

I haven’t used nextcloud, but having /var on an actual disk might help, if nextcloud writes to it often. Even if it doesn’t, it might still help a bit as a lot of software does, so it will still reduce the writes to the SD card.

You don’t actually need much on your root partition. Only /etc, /bin, /lib & if it’s separate, /sbin. Most distributions (inc. recent Debians, not sure which version rpi os uses) have symlinked /bin, /sbin & /lib with their /usr counterparts. This means that the binaries & libraries actually reside under /usr, so it has to be on the root partition, but /usr/local should be safe to move.

This means that you can put all the absolutely required directories on the SD card and everything else on a real drive.

So long as /home isn’t noexec.

They should all work, though I have no idea how quickly. Khronos lists the GeForce 800, 900, GTX 700, GTX 900, GTX 1000 & TITAN V series GPUs as Vulkan 1.4 conformant with the driver.