it's actually very stable on x86_64 these days, even with optimus.

A good instinct. There are a lot of things a $500 AMD GPU can do in linux that a $5000 DGX cannot.

If I understand your comment correctly, I think he addresses that in the first few paragraphs:

> The DGX Spark runs “DGX OS” but it is in fact just plain old Ubuntu 24.04 with some additions. If you want, you can just install another Linux distribution easily (Fedora works well), although there may be a couple of weird bugs with the Realtek Ethernet driver so the NVIDIA version of the Linux kernel has a couple of patches. Unlike some other ARM devices, the DGX Spark is all ACPI rather than device tree based, so regular Linux builds for arm64 work just fine.

Many other distros almost work out of the box (as in they boot and run without any modifications). The custom kernel patches you mentioned address mainly non-critical bugs such as a bug where the Realtek r8127 stops working after a reboot (but it works if you turn it off and on again) [1] [2]. I'd consider it in a way better state than trying to run other Linux distros on certain device tree-based devices like, say, Qualcomm Snapdragon machines. The regular NVIDIA drivers with the open source kernel modules work just fine. Talos Linux supports DGX Spark since version 1.12 [3]. I also know of people using Fedora and nixOS successfully.

[1] https://github.com/NVIDIA/NV-Kernels/compare/ea55925ab430f1e...

[2] https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/realtek-r8127-ethernet...

[3] https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/issues/12170

If you bought it for inference you made a mistake. They aren't good at that. Use it to train models and experiment with ML. It's much better at that.

If you just want local inference buy a Mac.

If you bought early on, like I did, the Spark is probably worth double what you payed now. I think I paid $3,000 retail for mine and the last time I looked they were fetching close to $6k on ebay. I'm not sure if that's still the case, but you can buy a very nice Mac with $6k.

I guess copilot needs all the help it can get?