A working lab
Fast systems and old machines.
Performance engineering, applied machine learning, and vintage computer restoration, measured on real hardware in the workshop of Paul D. Martin, Ph.D.
Technicomp Benchtop Linux · Alpha
The operating system for the technical workbench.
The LTS distro that rolls: an immutable, transactional GNOME desktop for workstations. Core packages track LTS releases and GNOME runs one release behind current, so the base stays stable while security patches arrive promptly. Tuned for very low interactive latency, with out-of-the-box support for AI, virtualization, development, security, audio, and content-creation work.
“Let other people be your beta testers.”
- Base
- openSUSE Slowroll
- Kernel
- kernel.org LTS, verbatim
- Desktop
- GNOME, one release back
- System
- Immutable, btrfs snapshots
- Apps
- Flatpak & Homebrew
- Hardware
- Surface, MacBook, and more
- Status
- Alpha images on OBS
Research
LLM Performance Engineering Notebook
Finding the real speed limit of local inference.
An open lab notebook on large Mixture-of-Experts models: measure the hard physical limit first, predict from a model, then change one variable at a time. It includes a llama.cpp scheduler patch that raised prefill throughput 13.7%, per-model results, raw logs, and the hypotheses that didn't survive measurement.
