You willingly use a distribution which purposely ships out of date software based on some misguided philosophical belief that such a behavior makes the system better or more stable. In reality, it just means that you're running out of date software with security vulnerabilities, bad driver support, and even worse distribution maintainer half-assed patches to fix the aforementioned vulnerabilities.
I'm not saying that you should switch to Arch Linux, but there is a wide gap between RHEL and Debian based distributions and a continuously rolling distribution. There are distributions that update weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.
I always prefer this.
>I'm not saying that you should switch to Arch Linux,
Especially when you Arch isnt supported at all by any version and quite likely to not even work as a video card. Manjaro also not supported.
>ut there is a wide gap between RHEL and Debian based distributions and a continuously rolling distribution. There are distributions that update weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.
RHEL seems to be up to date, the RHEL from May is well supported. I have tested out Alma as vms, but ive never used even fedora or centos in ages.
I personally used Fedora for a long time at the same time as I ran Arch Linux on servers. I honestly couldn't really tell the difference as long as I was updating Fedora every time a version bump came out. The release cadence was fast enough that it never caused problems. I ended up switching to it for my home devices entirely. Though now I run SteamOS and CachyOS because they're Arch without the headaches of Arch.
Not officially supported but it works well for many people who run ROCM on it (myself included). As always, documented on Arch wiki [1].
1. Ubuntu 24.04.4 with kernel 6.11
2. Ubuntu 22.04.5 with kernel 6.8
3. RHEL 9.6 with kernel 5.14
Anything else, like your preferred rolling release distribution, is entirely on your own.
I think its OK to install stuff to get extreme scientific compute performance.
I use NixOS BTW.
/me urgently awaits devstral 2507 on ollama
>I use NixOS BTW.
As a desktop environment? Tell me more! Please!
But in the context of GPU drivers, NixOS has all of the same advantages that it does for any other application: once you've got it working it stays working until you change something (and often it stays working even then). For stuff like GPU/GPGPU this is really fucking nice because that is not at all the status quo.
It's also nice that once a piece of hardware is supported well by anyone, that person can share the configuration as a module and it will work for other people, so in a sense it makes Apple-grade "perfect out of the box" experiences realistic on other hardware.
What does the OS even matter?
semessier•6mo ago
roenxi•6mo ago
Having some senior engineers taking a public interest in putting up this sort of article is rather exciting. I'm not going to give AMD the benefit of the doubt after their horrific performance in the 2010s and early 2020s but observing from a safe distance - they do look like they're on the right track and possibly even a fair way down the path to getting into the game.
fancyfredbot•6mo ago
I also don't understand the comment on "whatever ROCm can't do doesn't seem to be important because no-one has articulated why they need it in my line of sight". Isn't the problem with ROCm the lack of support? It's only officially supported on a tiny proportion of AMD's product line?
benreesman•6mo ago
imtringued•6mo ago
compsciphd•6mo ago
i.e. I'd argue that unless one is getting server chips (which negates the desktop graphics comment), it seems the vast majority of modern CPUs come with iGPUs that are sufficient for running a desktop environment. Unless one is planning to game on the same machine (but again, probably also not at the same time), if the above is the problem, why not use the iGPU for the desktop and use the dGPU for your ML workloads.
DiabloD3•6mo ago
1) I have no issues throwing ROCm (which still uses its own path in the driver) at my Radeon at the same time I'm hammering it with "normal" path APIs (Legacy D3D, D3D12, OpenGL, Vulkan, etc), they are scheduled normally and compete for GPU resources normally.
2) ROCm memory allocation is weird in the driver. I have gotten my GPU to hardlock the entire system by allocating about 2x my VRAM, because I suspect its misusing/overusing mprotect().
skirmish•6mo ago
DiabloD3•6mo ago
RDNA4 is officially supported on ROCm (release for that came out shortly after the drivers shipped), and PyTorch officially supports ROCm and AMD officially supports PyTorch's ROCm target.
fancyfredbot•6mo ago
I'd missed all of this when it arrived but I'm happy to see it. Articles like this one should be appearing a lot more often now and that's a good thing.