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Comment by hackerlight | Hacker News Reader

For a fresh Linux install with a 7900 XT/XTX, would Debian or Ubuntu be better (for Pytorch)?

As of right now, the most recent versions would probably be Debian 'testing' (our next release-in-development). But eventually, this shouldn't matter.

As with all other Debian development, we target the 'unstable' distribution for packaging work (similar to git HEAD). Packages eventually migrate from 'unstable' to the 'testing' distribution once they pass certain checks. And when Debian is ready for a new release, 'testing' will basically be tagged as '13 (trixie)'.

Ubuntu periodically syncs their packages from Debian 'unstable', so eventually they will have they same packages that Debian has.

Either way, we realize that running bleeding-edge distributions is probably not for everyone, so we intend to provide backports for both Debian and Ubuntu. Hence why I said earlier that eventually, it shouldn't matter. With "eventually" being sometime in the next few months.

(Site note: our own PyTorch does not yet ROCm support, we're still working on a few dependencies.)

> (Site note: our own PyTorch does not yet ROCm support, we're still working on a few dependencies.)

Can I clarify something. If we install a stable release of Ubuntu now, we wouldn't be able to get PyTorch to work with a 7900 XT/XTX? At least not until you've worked your magic and that's made its way to Ubuntu in a few months?

You wouldn't be able to use the PyTorch as built and provided by Ubuntu, as in 'apt-get install python3-torch' [1], as that version currently only has CPU support.

You could still use a version provided by a third party, for example directly from pytorch.org, or a containerized version provided by ROCm upstream [2].

[1] https://packages.ubuntu.com/mantic/python3-torch

[2] https://hub.docker.com/r/rocm/pytorch

I would love the answer to this question. I’ve tried with Debian and Fedora and gotten to different stages of the journey, but not successfully in either case.

How long ago did you try? Before or after official AMD support?

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-RX-7900-XT-ROCm-PyTorch

After. I am still currently trying.

(Apologies I missed your response earlier as this thread suddenly had a lot going on.)

Does this help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39144894

Did you try installing wheel package like in AMD's documentation. [0] Option 3.

After installing the dependencies using apt go to pytorch's getting started page [1] select Stable/Linux/pip/Python/ROCm and run the command

[0] https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/lates...

[1] https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/

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