2 ms·

I built a beast of a workstation in '23 and it's had like 5 collective minutes of downtime since. Debian 12, KDE, 13900K, 128GB ram, 2x2TB nvme disks for my hom

I built a beast of a workstation in '23 and it's had like 5 collective minutes of downtime since. Debian 12, KDE, 13900K, 128GB ram, 2x2TB nvme disks for my home dir in a btrfs mirror, a 4TB /var disk for containers, psql, etc. It's such a stable and consistent workhorse. Slack, Spotify, vscode, sublime, 1password, screen sharing, google meet, everything works great. Using Libreoffice/Onlyoffice in lieu of MS stack has not been an issue, even when doing extensive document comment reviews with financial companies etc who live on Microsoft tooling. The irony is that I am using this with a 5K Apple Studio Display, lol. The webcam and other onboard goodies do not work (can't control brightness) but the picture quality sure is good. The Linux desktop is 100% here.

dijit 1y ago
You can get the Studio Display to work pretty easily to be fair: you just need to pass through the video card to the motherboard and then run thunderbolt. I have Linux working with my Studio Display and it just worked out of the box; speakers, webcam and all. (though, the sound quality on the mac is better). The only issues were that when I use a USB-C capable graphics card, it only has displayport out over USB-C, and doesn't talk USB4/Thunderbolt to the rest of the computer.. so those devices don't get exposed to the motherboard at all. If you care- it's a kickass display anyway even if you don't.
- whalesalad 1y ago
  So interestingly, I have an ASUS Thunderbolt EX4 add-in card, but it doesn't seem to work for me. > you just need to pass through the video card to the motherboard and then run thunderbolt I will have to experiment with this. I was using the little daisy chain cables that allow you to go out from GPU -> immediately IN to Thunderbolt card, then monitor was connected to Thunderbolt card. But I couldn't even get any output at all. Would be curious to hear more about your setup!
  - dijit 1y ago
    I have the same card. I "authorised" the Display in the KDE control panel, probably it was this: https://github.com/KDE/plasma-thunderbolt https://github.com/KDE/plasma-thunderbolt I did that before linking the USB-C cable to the gfx card, but I'm not sure if that's required or not? It's the only thing I did. I had multiple displays at the time, now I just have the Studio Display - if it doesn't work automatically without authorization I wonder how you would bootstrap it..
    - whalesalad 1y ago
      What distro/kernel/kde version are you on? Checking now in my KDE control panel, I see that I do have a Thunderbolt section, and the display is listed as "Apple Inc. Studio Display - Disconnected, Trusted" I'll need to play about with this again over the weekend.
      - dijit 1y ago
        I’m using kubuntu, Trusted would make me think you’ve done the tight thing. FWIW, I have Two entries in my Thunderbolt list for this

dijit 1y ago

You can get the Studio Display to work pretty easily to be fair: you just need to pass through the video card to the motherboard and then run thunderbolt. I have Linux working with my Studio Display and it just worked out of the box; speakers, webcam and all. (though, the sound quality on the mac is better). The only issues were that when I use a USB-C capable graphics card, it only has displayport out over USB-C, and doesn't talk USB4/Thunderbolt to the rest of the computer.. so those devices don't get exposed to the motherboard at all. If you care- it's a kickass display anyway even if you don't.

whalesalad 1y ago
So interestingly, I have an ASUS Thunderbolt EX4 add-in card, but it doesn't seem to work for me. > you just need to pass through the video card to the motherboard and then run thunderbolt I will have to experiment with this. I was using the little daisy chain cables that allow you to go out from GPU -> immediately IN to Thunderbolt card, then monitor was connected to Thunderbolt card. But I couldn't even get any output at all. Would be curious to hear more about your setup!
- dijit 1y ago
  I have the same card. I "authorised" the Display in the KDE control panel, probably it was this: https://github.com/KDE/plasma-thunderbolt https://github.com/KDE/plasma-thunderbolt I did that before linking the USB-C cable to the gfx card, but I'm not sure if that's required or not? It's the only thing I did. I had multiple displays at the time, now I just have the Studio Display - if it doesn't work automatically without authorization I wonder how you would bootstrap it..
  - whalesalad 1y ago
    What distro/kernel/kde version are you on? Checking now in my KDE control panel, I see that I do have a Thunderbolt section, and the display is listed as "Apple Inc. Studio Display - Disconnected, Trusted" I'll need to play about with this again over the weekend.
    - dijit 1y ago
      I’m using kubuntu, Trusted would make me think you’ve done the tight thing. FWIW, I have Two entries in my Thunderbolt list for this