Jay

The main things that use up a lot of VRAM for me is definitely doing Blender rendering and shader compilation for things like Unreal Engine. My games probably would use a little more if I had any screen higher than 1080p. The most usage I’ve seen from a game was around 14Gb used

I haven’t messed around with llms on the card just yet but I know that Intel does have an extension for PyTorch to do GPU compute. Having the extra VRAM would definitely be of help there

That’s pretty much the lowest that I’ve found too.

From what I could find, this is the lowest price per GPU manufacturer (For 16GB of VRAM)

• Intel Arc A770: $260
• Radeon RX 7600XT: $320
• NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti: $450

I also use a NAS as my primary git server, although I’ve never heard of Forgejo before, but it sounds really interesting and definitely something that I may look into. It sounds really handy to have on hand, especially with code search and LFS. So thanks for introducing that!

At least for the RGB portion, I would also look into OpenRGB! Although I don’t have RGB keyboards, I do have lots of RGB in my computer that I sync up using it. They also have a compatibility list for their supported hardware, including a keyboard filter too

You make a very good point there. I’d probably be more inclined to allow ads on YouTube if they weren’t so intrusive to my privacy and weren’t trying to push scams or overly sexualized mobile games every 4 seconds. (Although I’m not sure if it’s still that bad, I completely uninstalled the YouTube app after it got that bad and exclusively use FreeTube now).

The YouTube premium subscription also seems like quite a bit. $13.99 for that and YouTube music, I don’t want YouTube music, I just want no ads.

As a Linux user of an Intel Arc card. I can safely say that the support is outstanding. In terms of price to performance, I think it’s pretty good too. I mainly enjoy having 16GB of VRAM and not spending $450-$500+ to get that amount like Nvidia. I know AMD also has cards around the same price that have that amount of VRAM too though

Which is why I would rather go with spending my money on YouTubers via things like Patreon, Kofi, GitHub Sponsers or even just get some merch. I would much rather go that route than spend money on YouTube to just not have ads. Yes, it’s a subscription, but at least from one of the creators that I watch, even just 1 dollar a month is much more money than what they get from ad revenue from a single person

I’ve had weird Linux issues similar to that before. However, I’ve also had weird Windows issues too where it didn’t “just work”. I’ve had 2 experiences that really stick out to me with Windows

The first was Intel ARC, I absolutely love the card I have and was using it on a dual boot system. Linux ran it like a dream under Mesa, I just had to install a few more packages to get GPU compute for things like Blender. But Windows was an entirely different story. The driver worked great but Windows update was the absolute worst thing to ever come out of this. I’d have my driver all up-to-date and Windows update would come along, and completely downgrade my driver, to this one specific driver (I don’t remember the exact version) that didn’t even support Intel ARC Control. It would do this randomly too, sometimes during a game, or during Blender renders which caused those things to crash and waste hours of time. It also had a 50% chance to just completely blue screen my system, which lead to a broken/incomplete driver install. It was a mess

The other was with a friend’s laptop I was helping repair. It was running Windows 11 and kept blue screening left and right for what seemed like RAM and driver issues. Tried switching out the RAM sticks, ran Memtest86, all tested good. Tried a new SSD and a fresh install of Windows 11, same issue even before any drivers were even installed. Tried the same thing but with Windows 10 and it worked flawlessly. The laptop had full support with Windows 11 and no workarounds was necessary but Windows 11 just didn’t work at all.

Not to say that Linux has been a smooth ride the entire time, far from it. But Windows has been pretty much the same from my experience in terms of weird bugs and crashes.

TL;DR: I’ve had my fair share with Windows shenanigans, been way too many times where it didn’t “just work” as much I would’ve liked. From GPU drivers to the entire OS.

Chromium alone depends on if it’s the Google version or the Un-Googled version. For the Google version of Chromium, it still has that hangouts extension. However, the Un-Googled Chromium has that extension removed via the build flags, the one to note is enable_hangout_services_extension=false.

As others have said though, it can also depend on what other Chromium-based is being used. Some browsers like Brave and including Vivaldi can have this turned off in the settings. Others like Edge and Opera are affected as well. However it doesn’t affect every Chromium-based browser.

My biggest issue with Windows (at least on my desktop) is with my GPU driver for my Intel Arc A770 LE. Windows Update will not stop automatically “updating” my driver to a driver that was made about a year and a half ago. It’s too old that Intel Arc Control doesn’t even work with it. It doesn’t matter how I install the latest driver from Intel, I can DDU the old one, install the driver and wipe all custom configurations or just install it normally. Nothing works, upon the next reboot, it automatically says “there’s an update” and installs regardless if I want it or not. The driver installation also has a 50/50 chance of blue screening my whole system when installing, both the installation from Windows update, and from Intel. The Window driver “updates” for my driver have also just happened randomly with no notice, they’ve occurred during hour long Blender renders, crashing it and wasting hours of my time redoing work. (This is all on Windows 10). It is frustrating to deal with

Meanwhile, my Linux install on the same computer just runs mesa and I’ve had no issues at all with my GPU. (Or any issues with drivers really, it all just works).

Although it didn’t “kill” my computer. Whenever I still used Windows, it would spontaneously install this outdated driver which would either blue screen or crash whatever I was in the middle of doing such as working in Blender, playing a game, etc.