-EDIT- Nvm that, I’ve tested several methods to make this work and none of em worked as I was expecting – a ramdisk with zstd compression.

Oh well.

a lot of people i know

So…gamers, and maybe a few youtubers with less than 10 subscribers? Nah, we güd.

Well, then – how about making the NPU process zram workloads (only)? I’d even ask “how about making it behave like a GPU instead of a NPU” but eh, I don’t think it’d top or even have a similar performance than… any GPU available in the market?

why you would want to do that.

Because apparently everyone and their mother wants to stick a NPU on every PC, and I’m not planning on using AI ever, so… why not give it another purpose instead of letting it collect dust?

-EDIT- Oh, how about making the NPU behave like a CPU but it (only) process “low-process-demanding” applications like video editors, window managers, etc? If anything, freeing up a few extra %'s might be a good idea for a few PCs.

As someone who is (somewhat) interested in doing a similar setup like yours – does it stack? As in, energy is divided between all pis that are connected to that single cable?

Last time I tried convincing em to install Linux, they said “I’m on it” to end up ghosting me after like I was a weird, random beggar they met on the street.

I don’t think that’ll be a good idea to promote the usage of microsd’s considering the competition is (almost) going full nvme – which is (obviously) miles better than any microsd.

software problems

Not having “out of the box” support does not make it a problem tho.

quality of distros

All distros are the same, considering they all run GNU/Linux and anyone can configure em at will.

It’s pretty good. Even better than the raspberry pi 4 considering its performance and comically low power draw (It doesn’t go over the 2W mark even with both cpu and gpu at 100%.). Other than that, it’s perfectly usable, despise its lack of (out of the box) support.

As a proud Orange pi zero 3 owner (which I’m using it as a “lab rat” by testing several things, including shutting it down like its a router)…? Nah.

A separate /home partition means you can set $ROOTFS as read-only (and /home as rw) and have a “pseudo-everlasting but not really” file system.

(And before someone says “Why not simply disable logs instead? It’s the same thing.” – yes, yes it is. But sometimes you want a “just werks” solution, even if it is a dumb one. Which is (obviously) disabling writes all over $ROOTFS.)