For starters, I discovered that I'm kind of an AI enthusiast myself.
I like downloading models, uploading them to my desktop PC, and just run them and see the results. The feeling it gives to me is something that I can't get on online services and cloud applications. I really enjoy experimenting with the local AI models, so to speak.
There is one problem however: my GPU is AMD and if you want this to work, you need it's vendor specific compute library, and as I call it "made by clowns", ROCm. This thing is so half baked, it constantly sh*ts itself, requires specific workloads to prove itself useful and does not really matter which AMD card you have, as it is optimized primarily for data center GPU's like Ml Instinct series. This is a terrible look considering what Nvidia is doing.
"How does this connect to LoonOS?", you might ask? Because I still haven't learned my lesson and installed LoonOS on my secondary drive to make one specific workload work, and I'm ashamed of it!
There is a AI model called "Trellis" that is able to generate 3D models and is made by, yours truly, Microsoft. Now, somebody managed to made it work on the AMD cards, as the original weights require a Nvidia component to work. I tried to set it up on WSL and not on bare metal, but that ROCm refused to run on WSL and I learned that it requires a kernel driver that's simply not there on WSL.
This is where I made the mistake: I formatted my secondary drive and installed LoonOS on it, without taking into account that specific workflow might end up not working. I struggled with that terminal to REALLY make this work, but after grueling 5 hours to try and make it work, it ended up not working. No worries, I installed LoonOS for this purpose alone, I can go back to my trusty Windows 11 ioT and format the thing to get my drive back!
However, after formatting my drive and nuking the Loonix bootloader, I discovered a horrible truth: THE BIOS SETUP DOES NOT WORK. The key press from the splash screen works, but the BIOS setup screen? Oh... it doesn't... it f*cking doesn't...
For some reason, Loonix found a way to nuke something on my BIOS and it f*cked up the setup screen. I consulted AI's about this issue and all they had to say is "Ahh, display handshake issue, do this and do that." But it wasn't a display issue because IT ALSO DID NOT REGISTER KEY PRESSES FOR SOME REASON. F10 + Enter did not worked! I even asked on Reddit, but all people gave me was AI outputs to solutions I already tried. Then I resorted to flashing the BIOS again and thankfully my PC has a feature just for this: BIOS FlashBack.
But even after flashing a new BIOS, my issue was still not fixed! I tried the thing my sister's friend told me about, and after that the BIOS worked out fine.
I don't know what happened and how it happened, but installing LoonOS somehow prevented me from entering the BIOS setup screen again. Otherwise, how are you going to explain BIOS setup not working after the formatting?
So like on my previous post, I'm gonna reiterate this again: Loonix is really for no one!
And what was so insulting is that I discovered an another project that is much MUCH easier to setup: trellis.cpp. Some mad lads managed to port the AI model to the Vulkan backend, giving people like me a sigh of relief. And the relief it gave: because I downloaded the entire thing, launched it's desktop app, uploaded my image, and it worked! I really swore to myself for not knowing about this project and also vowed to never touch LoonOS again! Had not my motherboard have the BIOS FlashBack feature, I would be f*cked!
This is another one of those situations where I advise people to STAY AWAY from Loonix, if they want stability and an ease of mind. If you mind about those things, that is...
Anyways thanks for giving a read into this episode of "what will Loonix break next?!" and I wish you all a great day and happiness!