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Comment by incomingpain | Hacker News Reader

ROCM support for RDNA4 cards in ubuntu is very poor. Worse yet, it's looking like ubuntu 25.10 isnt going to make anything better.

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There's a fundamental tension between "conservative desktop-origin mass appeal Linux distribution" and "extreme performance hardware accelerated numerics coprocessor". In the places where a mass market need is obvious (local LLM) solutions are emerging with vibrant and diverve back end options (gguf).

I think its OK to install stuff to get extreme scientific compute performance.

I use NixOS BTW.

>There's a fundamental tension between "conservative desktop-origin mass appeal Linux distribution" and "extreme performance hardware accelerated numerics coprocessor". In the places where a mass market need is obvious (local LLM) solutions are emerging with vibrant and diverve back end options (gguf).

/me urgently awaits devstral 2507 on ollama

>I use NixOS BTW.

As a desktop environment? Tell me more! Please!

I was being a little facetious (the sibling said something about Arch, obligatory "I use Arch BTW" reference").

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.

I'm going to say this in a not nice way: that's a you problem.

You willingly use a distribution which purposely ships out of date software based on some misguided philosophical belief that such a behavior makes the system better or more stable. In reality, it just means that you're running out of date software with security vulnerabilities, bad driver support, and even worse distribution maintainer half-assed patches to fix the aforementioned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'm going to say this in a not nice way: that's a you problem.

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 will agree that RHEL has gotten better about upgrading software when they do minor releases but I'm still painfully aware of the pre-9.X days when they would release a new version and the software was already a year out of date.

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.

> Arch isnt supported at all by any version

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] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GPGPU#ROCm

AMD officially supports precisely three Linux platforms for current ROCm:

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.

Sure that makes sense from a support perspective. My FPGA tools also only support a small number of OSes. But they, like ROCm, run fine on pretty much anything as up to date or newer.

I thought you can just get all the stuff you need in a docker container for both AMD and NVIDIA.

What does the OS even matter?

You still at least need a recent kernel

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