I’ll start with mine. yes part of this was to brag about my somewhat but not too unusual setup. But I also wanna learn from your setups!
Anyways: I primarily use Gentoo Linux.
I have two headless servers: a Raspberry Pi 4B and a Oracle cloud VM (free tier). Both running OpenRC, and both were running mainline kernel with custom config (I recently switched the Pi to PiFoundation kernel due to some issues). The raspberry pi boots from SSD and has no sd card inserted.
Both servers were running musl libc instead of glibc for a while. This gave me a couple of random issues, but eventually I got tired and switched back to glibc.
I have a desktop running gentoo and a laptop running arch, but hoping to switch the laptop to gentoo soon.
Both are daily driving wayland (the desktop had nvidia card and used for gaming). The desktop is running a kernel with a minimal config that compiles in 2-3 minutes.
What’s your unusual setup like?
I have NixOS running on my main desktop with some unusual changes:
- / is mounted as tmpfs, with /etc, /nix and /var being mounted from the actual system partition (this actually isn’t too uncommon on NixOS)
- For swap, zswap and dynamically allocated swapfiles using swapspace daemon (this is imo the best swap setup if you don’t need hibernation)
- Akonadi (KDE’s PIM server) using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL
- ISO8601 date format, for this I have glibc’s en_DK locale which does this copied to en_SE because Qt has en_SE as the locale with ISO date
- A couple changes to make the layout more like macOS because I can:
- Partitions are either mounted or auto-symlinked (if they can’t be mounted there, such as for the system partition) under /Volumes
- I patched udisks to also mount devices under /Volumes
- User home directories are under /Users and root’s home is /var/root
- Keyboard layout changed as far as I can to be mostly like Mac’s so I don’t have to rethink layouts as much when switching between this and my MacBook
- Can’t technically list this anymore since I’ve had to tear it down for unrelated reasons but NFS using Kerberos authentication for my NAS
- This is apparently very unusual since a lot of games completely break with it but two monitors with the main monitor on the right
What’s the deal with / as tmpfs about? I’m so trying to understand nixos.
NixOS can boot from a file system that only has /nix, since essentially the kernel command line has
init=/nix/store/.../init. Everything else will be created during boot by that if it isn’t already there. So technically you could only mount /nix and you would get a blank system every time you boot (but that wouldn’t be very useful in most cases). Mounting these is done in the initrd.A lot of people have a setup where only select files are mounted from a persistent partition, such as /var/lib/postgresql, basically anything they want to keep across reboots, so that the rest is discarded when they reboot. This prevents the system from accumulating junk over time, from services you once used to have but no longer have running, and so on. Personally I found it too much of a hassle to keep track of what files I want to keep, so I save the entire /etc and /var. I still keep the tmpfs though because it’s pretty cool.
A fellow en_DK user, I thought I was the only one.
Question: are you using Flakes?
I’ve been kinda dipping my toes on NixOS but the flakes are really throwing a wrench my way… Yet they are apparently NixOS’ future so I’m just kinda stuck
Yeah. Flakes are essentially three things (or four if you count the new CLI):
- Lock files for inputs (like NPM)
- A defined output layout (so, every flake has its packages at packages.<system> for example)
- Pure mode (don’t worry about it unless you read from arbitrary locations in the file system or try to download files without a hash)
That’s it, essentially nothing else changes. It’s just a different entry point to Nix code including NixOS configurations.
Here’s a great article (apparently, I have only skimmed it myself) explaining flakes more in detail: https://jade.fyi/blog/flakes-arent-real/
use flakes
I felt the same, but I’m reading through this book and so far it’s been helpful for understanding and setting up system flakes: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/
Flakes on the system level aren’t too bad. You can pretty much just keep your configuration.nix, but now you call that from a flake.nix. The difference is you remove all your nix-channels and you specify your nixpkgs in your flake.nix. So its really using a flake instead of nix-channels.
The cool part is when you nixos-rebuild the first time, it will save your nixpkgs version in a flake.lock. Then it will stay that way until you choose to upgrade with
nix flake update. Nice and stable.
This is apparently very unusual since a lot of games completely break with it but two monitors with the main monitor on the right
This is unusual? I use the same monitor configuration, and I didn’t notice any problems with it. Or at least I didn’t figure out they could have been caused by monitor setup. Could you give me an example of what problems have you encountered?
Either games spawning on the wrong monitor and not reacting well to you moving the fullscreen window to the other monitor, or mouse input issues. Latest I’ve had was L.A. Noire, which locks the mouse to a portion of the screen and doesn’t allow you to freely turn the camera. (I just tested it again and now it seems to work fine though! I hope that persists.) Quake II doesn’t allow you to move the mouse at all, or rather only in what seems in like a 2 pixel wide boundary in the middle of the screen. No such issues if the other monitor is turned off or configured to be on the right side. I’ve encountered more games that had issues with this in the past but these two are the recent ones I’ve had trouble with since setting it up like this again.
If you’re on Wayland, try gamescope. It’s basically built to handle issue like this.
With L.A. Noire, that actually made it worse. It spawned on the wrong monitor, and every time I moved the mouse, the camera would spin to the right no matter what (even with only one monitor, I think). I need to get around to making bug reports for these.
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I’ve long wanted to attend Ultra Music Festival. It’s somewhat reassuring to hear that I’m not missing out (this year). Sorry that wasn’t better.
Very cool! Thanks for sharing. I’ll pass this on to my friend who’s been at sea with his family for over 1 year.
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Libreboot Gaming Desktop
- Dell OptiPlex 9020 MT Motherboard
- i7 4790K
- 32GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
- 9TB (1TB M.2 NVME, 2x4TB Hard drives) RAID 0 with LUKS and LVM (/boot stored on SD card)
- NVIDIA 2080 SUPER
- NZXT S340 Elite Case
- EVGA 700W BR
- Debian 12 Bookworm
Libreboot Server
- Dell Precision T1650
- Xeon E3 1275 V2
- 32GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM (ECC)
- 8TB (2x4TB Hard drives) RAID 1 with LUKS and LVM (/boot stored on SD card)
- Debian 12 Bookworm
Libreboot Laptop
- Lenovo Thinkpad T440P
- i7 4810MQ
- 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
- 1TB SSD (/boot encrypted with Argon2)
- 100% Free BIOS (LibreMRC)
- Debian 12 Bookworm
GrapheneOS Phone (100% FOSS in the OS layer)
- Cheogram / JMP.chat for Calling / Texting
- Mint Mobile for Service (Cash)
- Ported number into JMP.chat
- F-Droid
LibreCMC Routers
- ThinkPenguin R1400 Ethernet (1Gbps)
- ThinkPenguin R1300 WiFi Router (100Mbs)
- Running under MullvadVPN (Paid in XMR)
OpenWRT Network Switch
- D-Link DGS-1210-28MP
- VLAN Support
Yeah that’s pretty much my setup, don’t know if it’s really strange or not lol
The Optiplex gaming setup is quite bizzare. Isn’t that CPU a bit of a bottleneck for this relatively powerful GPU?
Btw I used to own the same Thinkpad but it was supplied with a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 6xx-something, but never tried Libreboot on it. Given that I sold it in 2020, not sure if libreboot was even doable on it back then.
A bit, it’s actually not too bad. Rarely any micro stuttering on ultra settings in RDR2, I am actually planning on buying the AMD 7900XTX graphics card to put in this machine. I want to run local LLMs on it, I’m not too much of a gamer as I used to be. Anyways, this thing rocks! I love it. Eventually, I’ll plan on buying a MSI Z690-A DDR5 motherboard and install Dasharo firmware onto it.
How does it game for you so far?!
It can play all my games at 1440p and ultra settings (RDR2, GTA V, etc.) I’ve never had a time where I’ve wanted to upgrade from it. I built most of this computer for about $450-$500, all used parts I got off eBay plus some other parts that I pulled from my other computer
It’s strange!
My username has a space and a newline in it.
Random things break at random times.
a) why? b) what does your shell prompt look like?
Not sure if this counts, but on my install of nobara whenever I hover over an icon in the home bar it relocates to the bottom left corner of the screen, leaving an empty space. I can still interact with apps by clicking on the empty space where the icon used to be so it doesn’t brick my home bar, it’s just really annoying.
Well my unusual setup I spent years thinking about it before I was even able to have the money to achieve it. It’s based on portability and versatility and since I’m now working remotely now it makes even more sense. The plan was to run something portable with less power and smaller when outside, and leave the powerhouse to be accessed remotely. So for that reason I have a dualboot Oneplus 6 with LineageOS and Droidian, Waydroid container on Droidian and Debian proot-distro on LineageOS. That so i dont have to totally reboot for some tasks i might need on android or linux. 4 media folders shared between both of them as well as their containers. This makes sense now cause i long thought of running a Lapdock with it even if only wireless, and I got it recently! It works really nice on android but cant transmit over miracast on linux yet, still figuring that out. Nevertheless thats not the main device that is on my mind. A pinephone pro is a good fit too, but im leaning towards something like the gpd pocket 3, a real portable and modular mini pc that could be connected with just a cable to work better on the lapdock (also can be used as a tablet which is dope).
The powerhouse itself is a server with 16 threads of cpu and 64gb of ram and 2 gtx 1060s for graphics that i plan on configuring with vgpu to split graphical load between the vms with. It is also my remote gaming server :D with moonlight and sunshine, and i spent quite some time configuring all of it to be easily almost plug and play with controllers to have no issues if i disconnect or using multiple different controllers, with a good game launcher (Playnite) to host all games from it.
All of this just to someday achieve my dream of working wherever I want with a camper van to explore the world!
I’ve got a thunderbolt chip on an AMD motherboard, which doesn’t usually happen, and I’m running an LG 5k monitor through it. I use an IBM model M over native PS/2. I’ve got a Ryzen 7, but a GTX 1060 cuz it still works. It’s running Ultramarine Linux, based on Fedora.
Is it that Asus ProArt Creator motherboard? To my knowledge that’s the only AMD board that shipped with the special Intel chip required to use Thunderbolt.
I’ve been thinking of picking one up, but I can’t justify the crazy price for it.
Sometimes I’ll start up ConnectBot, which is an android ssh client, on my meta quest. Then I connect to my laptop and attach to a running tmux session so I can use the laptop keyboard but see the text in a virtual window.
My actual laptop setup is pretty boring though
Arch on 2019 MacBook Pro (16-inch) with MaXX Interactive Desktop.
Not mine but my partner’s machine (which I build and largely maintain for her) is a custom Debian install on ZFS root using ZFS boot menu and running a custom minimal i3 desktop environment.
I think my most unusual step os to select dvoark keyboard layout. Otherwise I’m pretty vanilla.
There’s another one of us! Quick! Take a picture!
I’ve only met one other person that knew who/what Dvorak was/is, and also reportedly used that keyboard layout.
I struggled with getting lost on the keyboard (several family members have dyslexia and ADHD–I’m not sure if that is related or not), and as an experiment spent 4 months exclusively using that layout to force myself to learn.
They never told me how my brain was also only big enough for a single keyboard layout. Usually in windows, games map to the same keys automagically. On Linux, not so much. I’m constantly remapping controls because I can’t be bothered to just have two keyboard layouts I swap between for games /facepalm
I use Dvorak too! Have it configured on a custom mechanical keyboard so I don’t have to change anything in the OS either.
Nice. I have seriously looked at this option too. For now I’m just too cheap to do it 😂
I’ve only met one other person that knew who/what Dvorak was/is, and also reportedly used that keyboard layout.
I experimented with it in University–I actually got a screwdriver and pried up and rearranged all of the keys on my keyboard within a week or so of starting–but after graduating I noticed that I was still slower at typing on Dvorak than I was on QWERTY so I gave up and changed back.
I’m way faster with Dvorak, and am 100% touch-typist only. If I look at the keyboard I’ll get mixed up. My phone keyboards are QWERTY though–go figure.
Dvorak doesn’t really make sense for phones anyway. There’s zero benefits. Maybe even negatively since qwerty spreads out the most common keys it’s easier for autocorrect to guess what you are actually trying to hit. I have no scientific data on it tho. Just a feeling.
Nope, you’re 100% right. Dvorak is efficient because it places high-use keys in the middle row and usually each key alternates between left and right hands. The use-case for a phone is usually single handed, or where you want one thump to be close to all the letters in a word. QWERTY is much better I think for one or two digits.
I tried it for a few hours because I thought it might be faster not flipping from QWERTY to Dvorak depending upon my device.
Turns out my muscle memory when using phones is as good as my muscle memory with keyboards.
It really is worth the switch.
Thank you! It’s so much more comfortable to typ on. Not faster, but Comfortable. I hate the awkward and annoying questions from colleges tho: wHY iS yOuR nOt woRkinG NoRmAllY?
And the mess that ctrl-c ctrl-v becomes is also super annoying. Mostly on windows its annoying. Linux is a bit more consistent.
I keep QWERTY available with the super+spacebar shortcut on both platforms, that way anyone else who needs to use it can switch back. Also, I have see-through Dvorak stickers added so it’s pretty clear that something is up with my keyboard just by looking at it. It also helps with finding those random symbol characters you use twice a year.
I used to have Gentoo running a Libvirt hypervisor, which would then run multiple short lived isolated windows and Linux machines with GPU passthrough for all the different companies and projects I was working on.
Spent far too much time keeping the guest machine images up to date, and all the configs and stuff managed and synchronised.
Then my laptop died that I was using to manage everything so I gave up.
A Qubes OS-like setup for windows machines. I like it. I do have an headless GPU ready in case I want to do such a thing.
Some tips? Where you running Windows 10? How was the performance?
Tips: don’t
Performance was ok. Lots of fiddling required on both host and guest to get performance close to native.
Couldn’t you just use Proxmox or Debian at that point? Having a stable base seems easier.
The host was stable. And I was compiling the kernel for hardware and vfio reasons anyway, so why not compile everything and it’s not like there was a lot to compile.
I use a very very minimal OpenSuse Tumbleweed KDE but I start the DE manually; startplasma-wayland or startx
Not sure if it counts, but I’ll share it anyways.
I use a chromebook which has two Linux containers running on it. One of them I’m experimenting with learning Docker and possibly selfhosting some things there. Only running one thing right now, and it seems to be going fine.
The other container is my main Linux “install”, which has all my apps like Inkscape, VSCode, Kdenlive, etc. The container uses a mix of nix, flatpak, and apt for installing things, which I do want to try and consolidtae eventually.
Probably not the weirdest of them all, but I do think it’s pretty cool to run all this on a chromebook.
Do chromebooks allow installing linux nowadays?
Yes. They do. Wrote about this on my personal blog recently. You can read up here:
https://mrchromebox.tech
https://www.reddit.com/r/chrultrabook
https://docs.chrultrabook.com/Been running it on a HP Chromebook for over a year now.
Yeah, the official way from what I understand is basically a container running inside a VM (with multiple containers behind a flag). They run Debian, but I believe there are tutorials for other OS’s if you want to try.
I’ve also heard of people who just replace chromeos with a Linux install, but I think that puts you at more risk of bricking your device.
I could mention that my bare metal server runs a rather unusual setup in that I use Arch Linux on ZFS headless as a kvm hypervisor and lxc containerisation host. I maybe want to migrate it to something else like NixOS at some point since I use nix on Arch on my desktop already but since I know Arch the most of any Linux distro I just went with it and it’s running rock solid for quite a few years already.
