There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Linux users with uncommon or unusual setups: tell us about it

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?

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Now, not so unusual, I have pretty dull and standard "gaming" type PC running stock Debian, but about 20 years ago as a broke mofo I was running a phpBB forum off a wheezing Pentium MMX laptop with no screen (got ripped off a year prior) on Mandrake Linux. The whole thing was just loosely sitting under my bed. Managed to get a userbase of just under a hundred people before I lost interest. I was using Webmin to manage it from another PC.

I had to connect up an external monitor every time I needed to do something I couldn't do remotely. I learned so much from that laptop. "./configure, make, make install" became muscle memory.

mfat ,

Not sure how unusual it is but I run openwrt x86 on a fanless Asus mini PC as my main router at home.

Pantherina ,

Do you use an external modem?

mfat ,

Yes I do. I have hooked up my x86 openwrt router to my fiber modem.

loudWaterEnjoyer ,
@loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Then it’s unusual

Pantherina ,

I want to use OpenWRT too but have no idea of the hardware, and we have cable here, and there is no supported router with cable. Do you know if I could just use some proprietary cable modem and attach that? Probably…

ImTryingLemmy ,

I just have my Xfinity modem in bridge mode. They looked at me like I had two heads when I asked if they could tell me how to do it at the counter but it was trivial by searching the model number.

possiblylinux127 ,

You can buy off the shelf hardware

possiblylinux127 ,

That seems overkill. Why don’t you use something less power hungry?

nyan ,

Gentoo + OpenRC + TDE (therefore X) on both a first-gen Threadripper desktop with 96GB RAM and a laptop from 2008 with an Athlon64x2 processor and 2GB RAM. Updating gcc on the laptop can take a while, but it still serves well enough. Plus a couple of headless Pis that are also running Gentoo. Not overly unusual, but I may well have the only Threadripper of that gen running that specific distro and DE combination anywhere in the world, since each individual item is kind of low probability.

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

Core2Duo with 2 GPUs running 6 monitors. Works like a charm for the last 5 years, it’s my everyday desktop and development station.

Downvote away because Manjaro and Wayland.

kylian0087 ,

I am mostly concerned about that Core2Duo. How do you manage to not overload it?

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

It’s amazing how well Linux performs on older hardware. Wayland seems to reduce the resource utilization a fair bit as well. The screens on the 980Ti are quite a bit slower than the RX480 so I arrange my workload accordingly and throw some windows over to an activity to increase my available higher speed screens. But the CPU rarely pegs out, it’s not like I’m doing ML shit, just building software for telemetry and automation, or working in spreadsheets.

possiblylinux127 ,

Couldn’t you switch to a ARM machine? There are some nice boards from Pine64 that would do the same thing with less heat and power draw

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

Find me an ARM board that supports 6 monitors. She don’t exist.

possiblylinux127 ,

www.pine64.com/boards/quartz128

!Ok, this isn’t a real link and you do have a point.!<

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

gadgetversus.com/…/arm-cortex-a55-vs-intel-core-2…

They’re kinda neck and neck on performance, though obviously at a vastly different TDP. At least if I’m reading that weird way they present the data correctly.

But yah, short of some sort of external displays, I can’t think how you’d get it to support all that video real estate that I like. Besides, I think the power usage of the computer pales next to the monitors.

Octorine ,

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

nobleshift ,
@nobleshift@lemmy.world avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    Turbo ,

    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.

    some_guy ,

    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.

    LiveLM , (edited )

    Oracle cloud VM (free tier)

    Remember to back that shit up rigorously, as Oracle is known to terminate free accounts with no warning (…which is fair for a free account imo)

    You probably already know this but I thought I’d say it just in case

    Andromxda ,
    @Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    Qubes OS counts as an unusual setup, right? Maybe even more unusual, I used to use Proxmox on my desktop PC, and I ran Debian and Arch on top of that. Also a little unusual, I use a MacBook Pro with Asahi Linux (actually the Fedora Asahi Remix).

    possiblylinux127 ,

    I’m thinking about running Proxmox on my current laptop but the battery life would be terrible

    Andromxda ,
    @Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    I really wouldn’t recommend it on a laptop if you want to use it as a portable, battery-powered device.

    possiblylinux127 ,

    It would be fine if I could passthough power information. It would take a little doing but I could pass though the GPU and USB controller to a VM along with Power information so that it would work like a normal install.

    I would need to use Debian as the base hypervisor so that I could use Disk encryption. Also Proxmox frankly is a bit overkill.

    dario ,

    I use Parabola GNU/Linux-libre.

    grue ,

    https://i.imgflip.com/8ki934.jpg

    sunred ,
    @sunred@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    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.

    fruitycoder ,

    I had the same issue of liking the UX of Linux admin too much to really use nix fully for system administration. I will say now being forced to work with an MacBook I decided now was when to start that journey. I like it, its been very clean over all but I feel like I am very much “developing” my system instead of administratering it, if that makes any sense.

    Communist ,
    @Communist@lemmy.ml avatar

    I’ve developed an install alias that automatically configure a wide variety of things really easily for arch, I had a bunch of people use my setup and logged the usage of each different keybind, then sorted them by most used and put those on the strongest fingers

    I’ve spent more than a few hundred hours configuring stuff, you can check it out here if you want:

    gitlab.com/that1communist/dotfiles/

    d3Xt3r ,

    I use Wayfire (which not many people use for unknown reasons), and one of the things I like to do with it is have a fiery drop-down Kitty terminal. :)

    https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/bde87b3d-479b-478a-bb4c-107bb55b9c57.webm

    I haven’t seen anyone else do a drop-down Kitty in Wayfire before, so I’d like to boldly claim I’m the first one to do so. :) Yes I know it’s pointless, but it’s also cool, and it’s fast thanks to being fully GPU-accelerated, so why not?

    And no, I don’t use the fire effect for other windows - that’d get real old, real fast. Thanks to Wayfire, I can define window rules so the effect only applies to my drop-down kitty. Also, my regular kitty windows open normally, without any fancy effects - and it’s possible to differentiate this thanks to kitty allowing you to specify an custom appid.

    I also use doas instead of sudo. I just got tired always fighting with sudoers, doas is so much more easier to setup and work with.

    Finally, I use grc to colorize all my log output. Makes my journactl looks nice. :)

    https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/52ab097d-1c8f-450b-81a8-0b0f8617e1d3.png

    enbee ,

    what issues were you having with sudoers?

    cyclohexane OP ,

    Wayfire is not tiling right? I imagine its a similar reason people didn’t use open box much. It’s a non-tiling window system, and people who go that route tend to to full DE. But I am with you. I wonder why not many more people use them.

    Doas is cool. I actually switched to it shortly before ditching both it and sudo, and deciding to rely on a users/groups system.

    d3Xt3r ,

    Yes Wayfire is a floating WM, but it does have a tiling module which supports simple tiling (up/down/left/right/top/bottom), and you can even define window rules for automatic tile and workspace assignment.

    Of course, this is probably not enough for hardcore tilers, but personally don’t think I’d ever need more than 4 tiles per screen - and if one or more of those tiles is a terminal, I can easily multiplex it using Kitty’s built-in splitter, or Zellij.

    pr06lefs , (edited )

    Nixos with xmonad and with xfce in no-desktop mode. Xfce gives me monitor positioning since I have two monitors and one is vertical. On a desktop, and on two laptops. Oh and I swapped my esc and capslock keys. Crazy I know.

    Also I have nixos on my pinephone, ha. But I don’t use it.

    dream_weasel ,

    I was unaware of no desktop mode, I’m using dwm but I find occasionally if a monitor gets jostled it will lose the input. Going back to login screen on my work PC fixes the problem but on dwm only it’s a reboot. I suppose this allows fixing that problem…

    pr06lefs ,

    My old procedure with the monitors, pre xfce, was an xrandr script. But I didn’t bother with positioning so the mouse goes straight across going from one monitor to another… you can probably do it but that was enough xrandr for me.

    xfce-no-desktop also gives me media keys, although the audio keys are broken in pipewire now. At least screen dimming keys work.

    dream_weasel ,

    Yeah I run an xrandr profile generated by arandr. It just seems really brittle. My monitor is also my kvm switch between machines so there’s a lot of input swapping and it doesn’t always behave.

    oscardejarjayes ,
    @oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net avatar

    I PXE boot my desktop.

    kylian0087 ,

    Well that is unusual these days. You PXE boot the entire OS and mount some type of network share or you use it more in a terminal sense to logon to a more powerful machine?

    oscardejarjayes ,
    @oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net avatar

    It’s a bit of a weird setup, and not at all practical. I build “golden images” with archiso, the image gets sent over, then local disks are auto-mounted. The local disks have my ~/home, so all my configs, flatpaks, games, etc. stay consistent.

    I use PXE for my servers, so I figured “why not?”. I don’t do too much on it besides videogames, I do most real stuff on laptops. This “setup” probably isn’t going to stay around forever.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •