This video is perfectly applicable, the rot that sets in in a large company when you have no competition to counteract it is exactly what has happened here.

Not sure a short summary will cut it.

They had no competition for a long period and ended up with an accountant CEO that caused their R&D to stagnate massively. They had a ton of struggling and failing to deliver all in most areas, and they wombled about releasing CPU generations with ~4% performance uplifts, probably saving a few bucks in the process.

AMD turned back up again with Ryzen and Epyc models that were pretty good and and an impressive pace of improvement ( like ~14% generational uplifts ) that caused them such a fright that they figured out they had to ditch the accountant.

Pat Gelsinger was asked to step up as CEO and fix that mess. They axed some obvious defective folks in their structure and rushed about to release 12th generation products with decent gains by cranking the power levels of the CPUs to absurd levels, this was risky and it kind of looks like they are being bit with it now.

Server CPU sales are way down because they are just plain uncompetitive. They have missed out on the chunk of money they could have got from the AI bubble because they never had a good GPU architecture they could leverage over to use. They have been shutting down unprofitable and troublesome divisions like the Optane storage and NUC divisions to try and save money, but they are in a bad way.

The class actions mentioned elsewhere in the thread are probably coming because the rush to make incremental improvements to 13th generation and 14th generation CPU’s resulted in issues with power levels and other problems that seem to be causing those CPU’s to crash and sometimes fail altogether.

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.

I got a pretty nice Yamaha bluray player that was an appropriate match to my home theatre amp.

Put a bluray in it, got a piracy warning, a few unskippable ads for other movies, an obnoxious excessively drawn out animated menu screen that stuttered like hell and was laggy to use.

Pulled the bluray back out of it, stuck it back in the DVD drawer and proceeded to download a copy of the movie to watch. Been doing that ever since.

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.

A couple of seagulls made their nest in the cooling vent for the radiator of one of our backup generators. I caught it on our security cameras and mentioned it to management which resulted in folks being dispatched to evict them and clean up the giant pile of sticks and other junk they had dragged in.

Not sure what would have happened next time the thing started, so it was probably for the best. I still felt bad.

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.

This damnable prison of log and ice eats away at my fibre. I find the lack of culture astonishing.

We did an address check when we could first order it and about a third of the folks in the office could get it about a year and a half ago. I know the majority of the address checks that we do for commercial locations in tenders come up positive now.

It is not cheap to get an off the shelf router that does a solid job of forwarding multiple gigabits and the vast majority of folks ( me included ) probably will rarely notice the difference outside of speed tests. The last firewall build that I did for home was with a pair of virtual Linux boxes with 10G interfaces just so I could do a 2G or 4G GPON upgrade later on without having to throw everything out.

In New Zealand it seems like 10G GPON services are mostly cannibalizing high quality lit ethernet services at 1G and 10G subrate rather than replacing consumer tails. So more likely a business is going from spending $1500 a month on uncontended 1G to spending $400 a month on contended 4G, rather than a residential user going from spending $150 on 1000/500 to $280 on 2000/2000.

My day job is building ISP networks. It’s been about 20 years since I had a home connection that I didn’t configure up both ends of myself.

I’ve got a 1G / 500M tail into home where I am right now, not that that is particularly impressive. One of the jobs I’ve been putting off at work is standardising our usage of the 10G GPON platform available here in NZ, when I do that I’ll get one of the >1G tails to use at home.

Usually the answer is how ever much I can be bothered building, but my usage is pretty low.

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.

I’m not the PR department for desktop Linux for everyone man.

People who only have Windows experience see an Nvidia card that is premium priced product with a premium experience and think that this will translate to a Linux environment, it does not. I’ve been using Linux for like 27 years now and that was my opinion until a couple of years ago.

Hopefully the folks that might read this thread ( like the OP 20 year IT veteran ) can take away that Nvidia cards in linux are the troublesome / subpar choice and are only going to get worse going forwards ( because of the Wayland migration that Nvidia are ignoring ).

Oh yeah. That video of Linus Torvalds giving Nvidia the finger linked elsewhere in this thread was the result of a ton of frustration around them hiding programming info. They also popularised a dodgy system of LGPL’ing a shim which acted as the licence go-between the kernel driver API ( drivers are supposed to be GPL’d ) and their proprietary obfuscated code.

Despite that, I’m not really that anti them as a company. For me, the pragmatic reality is that spending a few hundred bucks on a Radeon is so much better than wasting hours performing arcane acts of fault finding and trial and error.

If you go back a bit further, multi monitor support was just fine. Our office in about 2002 was full of folks running dual ( 19 inch tube! ) monitors running off matrox g400’s with xinerama on redhat 6.2 ( might have been 7.0 ). I can’t recall that being much trouble at all.

There were even a bunch of good years of the proprietry nvidia drivers, the poor quality is something that I’ve only really noticed in the last three or so years.

The support for larger numbers of monitors and mixed resolutions and odd layouts in KDE vastly improved in the ubuntu 23.04 release. I wouldn’t install anything other than the latest LTS release for a server ( and generally a desktop ), but KDE was so much better that it was worth running something newer with the short term aupport on my desktops.

We aren’t too far off the next LTS that will include that work anyway I guess. I’m probably going to be making the move to debian rather than trying that one out though.

It isn’t something that is in the distro vendors control. Nvidia do not disclose programming info for their chipsets. They distribute an unreliable proprietry driver that is obfuscated to hell so that noone can help out fixing their problems.

If you use an AMD card it will probably work fine in Windows and Linux. If you use an Nvidia card you are choosing to run windows or have a bad time in Linux.