I see the raise of popularity of Linux laptops so the hardware compatibility is ready out of the box. However I wonder how would I build PC right know that has budget - high end specification. For now I’m thinking
- Case: does not matter
- Fans: does not matter
- PSU: does not matter
- RAM: does not matter I guess?
- Disks: does not matter I guess?
- CPU: AMD / Intel - does not matter but I would prefer AMD
- GPU: AMD / Intel / Nvidia - for gaming and Wayland - AMD, for AI, ML, CUDA and other first supported technologies - Nvidia.
And now the most confusing part for me - motherboard… Is there even some coreboot or libreboot motherboard for PC that supports “high end” hardware?
Let’s just say also a purpose of this Linux PC. Choose any of these
- Blender 3D Animation rendering
- Gaming
- Local LLM running
If you have some good resources on this also let me know.
While PSU doesn’t matter for Linux compatibility, please, please buy a good one from a reputed brand. If you’re going high end, get at least an 80 plus gold PSU
That website is not really useful as the information is wrong or out of data
Petty much all modern hardware works with Linux. There are a few exceptions but that’s very rare.
PSU definitely matters, I went initially with a ThermalTake, it failed after a couple of months, then a Gigabyte, same thing, now I’m running a Seasonic and finally appear to be stable.
@possiblylinux127 It was a very high powered CPU, i9-10980xe, overclocked for all I could get out of it. At max load, it drew around 540 watts. Supplies were rated at 1kw but both short lived, the Seasonic I replaced them with is 1200 watts, also even cables are better quality, previous supplies cables were 16 guage but those that came with Seasonic, 12 guage.
You need to use intel/nvidia.
You might be able to get away with amd instead of intel, but nvenc and cuda support is a non negotiable thing for your use case.
You will not encounter any problems as long as you don’t run Wayland.
Any motherboard is fine. You don’t need coreboot support to run Linux.
Interesting you exclude AMD.
Any? I was thinking of MSI or Asus motherboards.
I don’t know of any msi or asus boards with problems. Of course, I rejected coreboot as a requirement so that plays into it.
My personal experience is: don’t overclock and everything will run fine for at least ten years.
Blender works faster with nvidia and it’s been the optimal hardware for maybe two decades now. There’s just so much support and knowledge out there for getting every feature in the tool working with it that I couldn’t in good faith recommend a person use amd cards to have a slightly nicer Wayland experience or a little better deal.
If you’re only doing llm text work then a case could be made for a non cuda (non-nvidia) accelerator. Of course at that point you’d be better served by one of those coral doodads.
Were you only doing text based ml work or was there image recognition/diffusion/whatever in there too?
You can absolutely use an AMD card for LLMs. You can even use the CPU if you don’t mind it being slower.
If this person is a AI researcher doing lots of LLM work it might be different but somehow I think they are just a casual user that asks questions
Both blender and every llm library I’m aware of work better and have broader support with nvidia hardware.
That’s two out of three of the ops use cases.
Gaming, the third use case, is perfectly fine using an nvidia card.
There’s nothing wrong with amd video cards, but for this user, in this case, they’re not the choice I would recommend.
Especially if they’re just a normal person who asks questions because it’s much, much more likely that someone who uses blender or llms will be able to answer their questions and address any issues related to hardware because people using blender and llm are broadly using nvidia cards.
The problem is that Nvidia cards also such under Linux. Sure it may work in some configurations but with a Intel or AMD GPU it works without fiddling around. As long as you have a new enough kernel it is a good experience.
Just a point on Wayland - I have an nvidia GPU and have been on Wayland for a couple months now (KDE Plasma), and its been entirely problem free and I actually forgot I switched from X11 to Wayland.
Blender has support for Wayland now too.
I do a lot of gaming and development - ever since Nvidia made those changes for Wayland support and KDE added that explicit sync stuff its been great. Before all of that though I had heaps of issues with flickering and just general usability.
Wayland actually fixed a number of issues for me, like stuttering when notifications appear, and jankyness in resizing windows.
Also Blender = Nvidia (judging by Blenderbenchmarks, never had an Amd card so can’t compare in praxis …)
