Give Mint Debian a try - I've been very happy with it.

https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

For those of you interested in building 3D things (using CNC, lasers, woodworking, 3D printing, etc), check out this forum:

https://forum.makerforums.info/latest

There are some active HN folks who participate in both communities. (Check out Oscar Gallegos, who uses AI to generate depth maps, and carves those into wood using CNC router)

I used OpenCode to help me install ollama, Qwen local LLM, and connect OpenCode to it.

The computer is very slow (old Dell Optiplex running Mint Debian Linux), but it worked! So cool to turn off the network, and still be able to chit-chat with Qwen model ("Tell me a joke about...").

cool, I'll have to mess around with it some more. I don't expect to be able to do any real work with my 16GB MacBook Pro, but eventually, I would like an all local setup.

Can you share some more detail of how you would implement this? Are you thinking something like VirtualBox (?), running a virtual machine, and you're using - for example, OpenCode terminal in the VM...?

I've used pretty much this type of setup:

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-02-01-coding-agent-...

If you want something not NixOS-related, smolmachines.com (I haven't tried this yet) gets mentioned here a lot.

One practical reason - system stability for important events.

I travel for work, and often have a tech demo, solution, tool, or something to show - or am running a workshop.

I usually do NOT update things right before my trip, as I want to minimize the potential for disruption.

Isn’t this what docker is for?

Jokes aside I do the same I tend not to upgrade my Mac, my phone unless I really have to.

The “update” button on the top of my brave install has now turned from green to orange and I’ll likely wait until it goes red

> Isn’t this what docker is for?

What? Pinning a browser?

First thing it'll want to do after starting is update itself to newest version anyway.

What are the top ones you recommend? ( I am running Mint Debian Linux )

Another plug for Handy, and wanted to share something cool about it.

You can set it "Push to talk" mode (like a walkie-talkie radio), and when you're done talking and release the button, it can paste the text into any text field.

You can even replicate ChatGPT voice conversation mode, by having Handy as your speech input, and then (I forgot the extension) enabling a speech-to-text model for OpenCode. Surprisingly relaxing flow for certain tasks, like tweaking a website's styles.

Whisper flow does a good job of this too, speaking to transcribe directly into a focused text input

Bootstrap stands the test of time! I use it as my go-to unless I have a reason otherwise.

Can you explain more what you are looking for, and what you are hoping to achieve?

- i do game recordings

- my actual voice is terrible and i have a lot of noise in vicinity to sit and process it

- what i want is to be able to talk into the mic and an AI voice is generated in real time with a very large degree of accuracy

- bonus if it works with OBS as a plugin or something

That's interesting -

I have been playing with Whisper speech-to-text recently (both CLI, and also . Depending on the model & computer performance, it seems like it can stream (listen and transcribe to text) audio. Maybe you can pipe that to a text-to-speech service (remote or local), and configure that as an audio input to OBS.

Are you live-streaming, or just recording video file to edit/publish later? If it's not live, that may relax some of the latency requirements.

Related links:

- https://github.com/openai/whisper (speech-to-text for terminal)

- https://buzzcaptions.com/ (graphical interface to Whisper)

Somewhat related, Descript mentions it does dubbing. I recently used this tool to edit a video, and I was impressed by how easy it was, and accurate too. It may not fit your realtime use-case, but might be worth exploring...

https://descript.com/

Good luck!

- i am curious about something else as well

- what exactly is the architecture of speech to speech?

- is it speech to text and text to speech or am I badly understating the actual mechanism

thank you for the links. i dont intend to live stream but to record

Browser bar technique - yes!

Alt+Tab (switch to browser), Alt+D (to get to the browser bar), Ctrl+V (paste), Ctrl+A (select all), Ctrl+C (copy), Alt+Tab (switch to application), Ctrl+V (paste unformatted text)

What a muscle memory! Wish Ctrl+Shift+V (paste plain text) was standardized at the OS level.

Note: Using Mint Debian Linux, but the same flow seems to apply to Windows & Mac.

Bonus: I really wish copying a file in the GUI (Finder on Mac, file explorer on Linux) would default to pasting the full file path/name, when pasting into plain text. I can't believe how difficult it is to get the actual file name in a modern OS!