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 use a very very minimal OpenSuse Tumbleweed KDE but I start the DE manually; startplasma-wayland or startx
I have a laptop with an easily accessible m.2 slot, which I use with an m.2 to pcie x16 adapter to connect an external desktop grapics card to game and run ai. apart from that, a diy nas running opensuse and a couple vms for dns, remote nas access, etc
Debian testing on a MacBook Air 6,2 (2013). I guess that’s kinda weird. Works fine as a netbook: Firefox, Thunderbird, TigerVNC (handles the low resolution well) and SSH. That’s all I ask of the thing and it works fine. The only hardware that doesn’t work is the webcam, everything else is 100%
It was a free hand-me-down and I put a $45 battery in it so I can use it on the couch. I think what will kill it is when the proprietary charger dies, they cost more used on ebay than the battery did.
Nice I have a MacBook pro 2016(?) that runs a flavor of Ubuntu over at a local makerspace. It was hard as heck to find and customize the driver’s to get it working, but it does!
I sometimes use a snap
Gross
🤷♀️ the snap works absolutely fine with no issues, the flatpak doesn’t exist and the apt is two years out of date.
I’m not on the outrage boat myself tho
Both are terrible for security. Apt is actually safe
Lol, no, it isn’t. Anyone can set up an apt repository and ask you to use it. Many providers do… You might mean the walled garden of an official singular apt repository is safe.
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.
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
I’m running a distro named Navigatrix along with softplexer Muplex and chart plotting software called OpenCPN. I’m using two USB GPS pucks, and an RTL-SDR for VHF AIS transmissions. Muplex will take data inputs from all three NMEA protocols (onboard nav data from appliances/radios (I have Simrad & Icom products)), GPS data, AIS data and pipe it around to whatever laptop or tablet I have on hand, and can even use GPS data, over Bluetooth/wifi/cable from a phone as backup. All connected through a small GL pocket router.
I live off grid on a 29’ cruising sailboat, currently in Miami for Ultra (disappointing) making my way to Colombia.
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.
He’ll have to compile Muplex from source as it’s not a part of Navigatrix, I found it via another marinized distro Marinux.
Wellll, so I practically used to write my own WM
Stump user huh?
Not my main rig, but my most unusual is 32-bit Yocto Linux on an Intel Edison that I got for free from a college professor that worked for Intel.
Yocto is awful. I mean it has a niche I guess, but there is basically no package manager. Somehow I managed to install a Rust toolchain on it, but it couldn’t build the web server I wanted to run on it.
I’d much rather have a Pi running a sane distro.
Oh, I remember having to use Yocto when I started experimenting with the BeagleBone Black SBC back in 2015. Yes I remember it being very hard to use. I remember I had need to rebuild the kernel to include a disabled kernel module. The cross compilation on my desktop PC didn’t work, so I had to build it on the BeagleBone. That was an awful process, it took about 6 hours.
For anyone not familiar, the BeagleBone Black was an SBC that came out as competitor to the Raspberry Pi 2. The main difference was the BeagleBone used an open source design, based on a non-NDA CPU unlike the RPI, so it meant they published full kernel sources. But in my experiments I found the BeagleBone CPU was much slower than the RPI, and it’s graphics hardware was almost non-existent compared to RPIs integrated graphics.
Yah, BBB was horrendously slow. Lots of neat features like realtime PDU and tons of IO, but the only way to use it was Debian headless because a full DE was painful. I bought a 7" touch display to use as an HMI that the BBB mounted on the back of and it duplicated the pins so you could put a cape on it (that didn’t conflict with the HDMI pins it used), but I never used it because it was so slow.
BBB is actually really good nowadays compared to where it started. I’ve got quite a few deployed hardware appliance designs with them baked in. The real time IO and subprocessor was a nice quick and dirty way to get a little psuedo FPGA
Lenovo support seems to think I have an unusual setup since I run Linux on their Thinkpad & while the NVMe even after an RMA fails under heavy IO despite their partner WD, who sent me an email response saying they never test or certify drives for Linux or BSD. Many users have been experiencing similar failures with their controllers WD proudly boasts as in-house. Note that Lenovo also has a support PDF about running the device on Linux, but the support is ran by a bunch of clowns. Also not that when you purchase, the hardware brand is never mentioned so there is na room for due diligence.
Tl;dr: if you want a working Linux system, don’t purchase Western Digital or Sandisk drives.
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.
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.
i have a single box i use for data storage; backup; wifi; router; and switch.
it runs ubuntu on the bare iron with
- a windows 10 kvm/qemu vm with pci pass through on wifi to get 1 gig wifi speeds on intel in ap mode (intel won’t allow it using linux drivers)
- a pfsense kvm/qemu vm for router & firewall to internet and with pci pass through on a 1 gig nic to gap the internet from the base ubuntu
- dns & ip masquerade along with kvm/qemu based sofware defined networking for windows, pfsense and ubuntu to forward all wifi and cabled network through to internet and
- connected via 3 gig nic and switch for much faster local data storage and backup on the ubuntu install.
- vpn and remote backup using pfsense for access to my setup from anywhere else in the world. (eg routing traffic from the office to my home connection for personal use and access to my data)
topographically, it looks like this, but in reality it’s all one box:
┌────┐ ┌─────────────┐ ┌───────────────────┤vpn │ ┌──────────────────┤windows (wifi│ ▼ └────┘ │ └─────────────┘ ┌──────────┐ │ │ internet │ │ └──────────┘ ▼ ┌───────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌───────────┐ ▲ ┌─────────┐ │ubuntu │◄───────┤switch│◄─────┤ backups │ └────────────────┤ pfsense │◄─────────────────┴───────┘ └──────┘ └───────────┘ └─────────┘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.
musl in a nutshell
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!
