Day 1: Project "Local AI Workstation" | Reclaiming the Core: System Reset

A few weeks back, I tried running Ollama on my main Windows 11 rig. It should have been effortless, but it quickly turned into a nightmare of system freezes and cryptic errors. The issues vanished only after I completely wiped Ollama, leaving the root cause a mystery. The Workstation Rig (Initial Attempt): Processor: Intel Core i7-14700K (20 Cores, 28 Threads, 3400 MHz) Memory: 32GB RAM Storage: 512GB NVMe + 1TB SSD Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 3060 Series OS: Windows 11 Instead of wrestling with my Windows workstation, I’ve decided to pivot. I’m repurposing my old laptop, MSI GE65 Raider to serve as a dedicated Linux-based AI node. It’s time to get closer to the metal and build a stable environment where I can experiment without crashing my main workflow. The Hardware: MSI GE65 Raider CPU: Intel Core i7-9750H GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 (Essential for those CUDA cores) Memory: 16GB RAM Storage: 2x 512GB NVMe + 1TB SSD + 1TB HDD (Plenty of room for LLM weights) The OS Choice: Why Pop!_OS? For