I had an opposing shower thought the other day so I’m going to play devil’s advocate on this one.

I think in a world of rational, good-faith actors (which I’m not arguing we live in), this is both by-design, and optimal at society scale.

Think about those things you’re good at, and the things you’re not so good at. I’m really good with computers, my time is most efficiently spent troubleshooting and building technology stacks. This skillset is in demand enough that I make a comfortable living doing it.

I’m comfortable enough that I have time to learn other skills when needed, but not comfortable enough to hire out all the otherwise commodity tasks I need done. A leak in the roof, a sink that needs replacing, some cat6 through the walls, leveling a floor before replacing broken tile from the 80’s… You get the idea. I can do drywall and other general contractor work but I’m not great at it. It takes me longer to end up with a worse end product than a professional, and I don’t enjoy doing it.

Every Saturday I spend doing drywall could, at society-scale, be much more efficiently spent building a k8s cluster or helping a scientist build software for research. Just like the guy doing my drywall should have a me on the other end of a phone when he needs a new laptop, or his mother gets malware.

When people hit “rich” the unspoken meaning is supposed to be that their time is valuable enough that society deems it more useful to spend it outside of commodity tasks. That seems like a good fundamental design… say what you will about its current real-world implementation.

Please do

I’m with you that he doesn’t strictly need a gpu, but if the price is right (free from old gaming PC, cheap from a friend’s old gaming PC, cheap old workstation card, etc) I stand by that he probably wants one. A lot less fussy, a lot more capable, nad nvenc does better quality encoding at lower bitrates (and probably less power too if you take into account time spent encoding at full tilt.)

Generally power supplies are the most electrically efficient at 20-60% utilization, so there’s no issue with over-provisioning power, other than the (generally minor) upfront extra cost, which might very well pay for itself in the first months/years of usage. I’ll take a look and see what I can find on those sites.

Edit: okay, trying to shop through google translate / currency calculator is actually aids so I’m gonna teach a man to fish instead. This is what I should have done from the start anyway.

Power supply: Anything from a decent brand, at basically anything >450W. a 650W or 850W is totally fine if it’s at a decent price. They only draw the power they need, they don’t just constantly pull 850W if the downstream components aren’t calling for it.

CPU: 12400 is a fine cpu for what you’re doing. You’ll transcode at 720p no problem, 1080p maybe a single stream in real-time. I wouldn’t bank on more than that. Only downsides here are the relatively shallow core counts if you ever expanded into other workloads. Without access to used xeon boards/cpus, it might be a reasonable choice though. What I would say is look for something older but with more cores/threads if you can. For example, a 10900 or even 10700k would probably be a better server cpu than a 12400.

Memory: DDR4 platforms are a great way to save money, as long as you aren’t planning on expanding to inferencing on cpu. Get as much as you can. 32-64gb of ddr4 should be dirt cheap, especially if you find a cheap motherboard with 4 memory sockets.

Motherboard: If you want this thing to be versatile, you want 2x pci-e slots. Old gaming full-sized ATX boards are the way to go here. 1 slot for an HBA, 1 slot for a GPU, and that should be all you need. Bonus for as many open sata sockets as possible. 6-8 is pretty typical on 10th-12th gen gaming ATX boards.

GPU: gpus will be much more efficient at transcoding than an igpu, especially from older intel CPUs. A 1050, 2060, 3050, basically anything from the 10-series onward has a decent nvenc encoder that would work well with plex/jellyfin. My goto is generally old workstation cards, I use a p620 myself and it handles a single 4k encode job no problem. I’m not sure if they’re viably purchasable anywhere in your area, but I’d definitely look out for a P620, P1000, or T400. Great value in those cards.

Drives/HBA: there are inexpensive LSI HBA cards to expand how many drives you can attach to a system if you need them, all you need is a spare pci-e slot and a place to physically mount the drives. The cheapest way to start here is to look for a motherboard with 4-6 sata slots and use those. Hardware raid is functionally dead these days in the real world, just use zfs or mdadm under linux to create an array with your desired level of resiliency/capacity.

Once you’ve priced out what it would cost to buy all of this new, look for prebuilt gaming PCs and office PCs that might be able to be expanded to fit these requirements. Prices look kind of steep on those markets you listed, but I’m sure something exists if you look hard enough.

The ASICs will come as soon as the architecture stabilizes. The problem with building specialized hardware today is it won’t necessarily be capable of running models that come out tomorrow.

happy to help!

An example of this:

Bitcoin mining started on cpus, then moved to gpus, and now exists on dedicated asics.

A $200 GPU vs a $200 ASIC, the ASIC is going to be a faster sha256 calculator

A $2000 GPU vs a $200 ASIC, the GPU is going to be a faster sha256 calculator

A $200 GPU from today vs a $200 ASIC from 10 years ago vs a $200 CPU from today?.. You get the idea.

There’s no way to know without specific details which will be faster. You could be running software encryption on a raspberry pi from 5 years ago or the drive could be running an encryption ASIC from 10 years ago, etc

The short answer is that: all other things being equal, it will always be faster and cheaper to do things dedicated in hardware. Comparing one implementation to another, however, is always going to be an “it depends”

Never Back Down. That movie is just such a vibe.

I am also curious

Regular Ubuntu I get; it’s specifically the separation in the list between core and the standard 24.04 distro that I don’t get. I can’t imagine that droves of nerds are installing straight Ubuntu Core unprompted. I’d absolutely buy though that some distro or some handheld is based on one.

Where are all the Ubuntu Core 22 installs coming from? Is there some large device or distro that uses it?

DRM is already the primary purpose of trusted compute if you read shareholder meeting transcripts; security is a marketing side effect.

I don’t have a sim or VR, I purely use keyboard/mouse/controller/fight sticks across my various setups

To expand, my main workstation is a $180 eBay used Dell that I slapped a 3050 in. Tower in its entirety cost <$400 and realistically, I only needed the GPU because I have a 4k/240hz main display, and 4 total.

There’s no need to go headless on the Linux workstations, I don’t, although I do build the system myself from headless to keep the bloat down. X11 and awesomewm/i3 is like, 100-300mb of ram with modern necessities included

I use the Linux workstations with awesomewm for 99.9% of my computing needs, moonlight only comes out to connect to the gaming PC

I sort of run this setup right now @4k/240hz. The only part of this I don’t do is flight sticks.

I run Ubuntu on my interface workstation on a 9700T/32gb/30506g and sunshine/moonlight to my rack mounted gaming desktop downstairs running win11 on a 9900X/32gb/5070. I also have an Ubuntu machine upstairs and in the living room that leverage the same streaming setup to put games there. Works great on my phone too with a Bluetooth clamp controller

Windows on the gaming PC is the way. Yeah there’s a lot of bullshit there but it literally only streams games. Use the ctt winutil to strip out most of the annoyance and you forget windows even exists

Remote assistance is not rdp, it’s Microsoft’s support hook over the Internet, which requires telemetry to function. It is distinctly separate from, and not a prerequisite for RDP.

The rest of that I’ll have to look into, but disabling remote assistance seems sane in that context.

I wonder if other parts of the shutdown dialog or hover context menu have phone home functions that can only be disabled in roundabout ways; it wouldn’t be the first time. It would not surprise me to learn that the “which apps are preventing shutdown” dialog would be something that triggers a call to phone that data home.

I must be really old then!

It’s almost certainly related to cloud-init, (the canonical tool for handling deployment automation) or Ubuntu pro (extra long support for backporting security packages to older distros, plus some conveniences). They’re pre installed as a convenience to paid users of those services, that’s the (IMHO, quite reasonable) model they use to fund the distro. I would expect that some or all of that traffic would disappear if you disable/remove those two services.

https://cloud-init.io/

https://ubuntu.com/pro