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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?

StorageAware ,

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.

onlinepersona ,

Do chromebooks allow installing linux nowadays?

StorageAware ,

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.

Vee ,
@Vee@musician.social avatar

@onlinepersona @StorageAware

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.

onlinepersona ,

Holy moly! That’s going into my bookmarks. Thanks! A few people I know have old ChromeBooks and were forced to buy new devices due to the lack of updates. But if they’re supported by this script, I could switch them over to linux!

Thank you 🙏

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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.

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/

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.

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.

fruitycoder ,

Irubn Bluefin which is a downstream of Fedora built to be more Dev focused and “cloud native”. Desktops apps are flatpak first, my terminal just opens distrobox containers, system CLI tools I get from nixpkgs, services i run on a k3s service on it, and I have use vscodiunm with gitpods to support devcontainers hosted on the k3s cluster. I sometimes pxeboot a raspberry pi or another laptop or a server from my openwrt router to add compute to the cluster if I need it.

Been tinkering with, well, Tinkerbell to do the pxe booting from the k3s cluster but I may go back to Metal3 so I can just used the servers BMCs and do the extra work to config the pxe boot from there.

I really want to get it too full distributed desktop OS at some point, either using moonlight or some real systems work with RDMAoCE and tricking the processes into thinking they are on the same system. That one feel very RnD though.

deania ,

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.

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.

daddyjones ,
@daddyjones@lemmy.world avatar

I have a stateless and immutable system based on arch images that get built every night. I also have two different images for the same machine: one for general use and one optimised for music production. I just rebooted into the other image and I’m set.

fruitycoder ,

What system are using to switch between images?

flashgnash ,

I use Microsoft edge

mjpc13 ,
@mjpc13@programming.dev avatar

I have a Microsoft Surface 7 running NixOS. Everything works, even touch/pen

gigatexal ,
@gigatexal@mastodon.social avatar

@mjpc13 @cyclohexane that’s impressive. Would mean the laptops should also be supported ? Was it hard to do?

mjpc13 ,
@mjpc13@programming.dev avatar

It was not too hard if you are already familiar with Nix. The features supported (and the custom Linux kernel) can be found in surface-linux. For NixOS I used the nix-hardware flake to simplify things.

The worst part was the compilation of the Linux kernel, that took hours on the surface. Eventually, I used the remote nix build feature to compile on a more capable computer.

gigatexal ,
@gigatexal@mastodon.social avatar

@mjpc13 this would be an amazing blog if you wrote it up. Front page HN content right here. Very cool stuff. Thank you for sharing.

mjpc13 ,
@mjpc13@programming.dev avatar

Maybe I’ll write something in the future

daddyjones ,
@daddyjones@lemmy.world avatar

Just a reboot. There’s an EFI menu listing all the available images - I keep a couple of old ones around to roll back to in case of problems - and I just select the one I want.

Harbinger01173430 ,

I have a ZFS Ubuntu deaktop install que on an all amd PC and use snap. Given that everyone else has something completely extravagant and hate snaps, I’d say my standard build is unusual.

BCsven ,

I have a 2010 iomega arm board NAS. It is a board and a 3.5 HDD in an extruded enclosure. Lenovo bought them and quickly trashed the OS with google ads in the web interface, then dropped support. The HDD was aging and a bit noisy for my liking. So I found an industrial sata SSD and swapped out the 3.5 HDD. I found an OXNAS kernel online, and installed debian (only supports older Kernel 3.xx due to limit of memory ) Runs older version of OpenMediaVault for Samba shares, and daap server plugin. But recently setup MiniDLNA. Streams music mostly to our sound system, to my phone or PC. Does that on 256MB RAM

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