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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
My desktop is a VM with vfio passthough
I use a very very minimal OpenSuse Tumbleweed KDE but I start the DE manually; startplasma-wayland or startx
i have a gentoo system with a custom s6-rc service tree that fully replaces openrc and boots via s6-linux-init.
instead of a display manager i have tinydm (from postmarketos) and autologin setup. since i use full-disk encryption and suspend-to-disk i find that i don’t need the extra login step into my user session.
i have a bunch of bemenu-based helpers for wifi, bluetooth, vpn, audio, passwords, mounting drives, etc.
i don’t have polkit or sudo installed. i use doas.
Do you have those bemenu helpers in a repo somewhere? I’ve been really getting into bemenu scripting recently and I’m really enjoying the results (case in point: when I do a logout/shutdown via my bemenu logout script I feel like an absolute boss).
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
Check out guix or nixpkgs too, very good alts if flatpak or distro pkg manager doesn’t have it. Snap’s store is proprietary.
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.
I mean seeing how often malware and other bad stuff has gotten on their. It is bad for the linux eco system in general. Worse then finding random installers on windows
I used Ubuntu for years and never had a single issue with snap. I didn’t even know about the hate back then, nor had I heard of Flatpak. I eventually started to really like it and prefer to get my apps as snaps when available. Eventually I had to give up that laptop because it belonged to my work, and I left for another job. When I installed linux on my personal laptop, I decided to move away from Ubuntu for reasons completely unrelated to snap or proprietary software.
Security.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
That’s the one! Damned good on the eyes, too.
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.
Not sure how unusual it is but I run openwrt x86 on a fanless Asus mini PC as my main router at home.
That seems overkill. Why don’t you use something less power hungry?
Do you use an external modem?
Yes I do. I have hooked up my x86 openwrt router to my fiber modem.
Then it’s unusual
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…
You can buy off the shelf hardware
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.
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:
deleted by creator
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!
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!
