Linux users with uncommon or unusual setups: tell us about it
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?
My work machine isn't too unusual, apart that it has 52 USB devices connected. And here's something you may not know: Linux can't enumerate more than 16 USB ports if the root is configured as USB3, so I had to force all the ports to run in USB2 mode - which is fine in this case, since most of them are serial ports.
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
Not mine, but while I was an intern for a lab I enjoyed using a very normal-looking desktop with a casual 4TB of DDR4 and no SSD or HD, dual Xeon configuration. Rather, it did network boot and pivot root into an in-memory filesystem. It had a UPS and typically ran for months entirely from volatile storage and was used to run experimental photo and video processing. This was about ten years ago.
I have Void Linux running on a GPD Win 4 (6800u). It performs well enough to emulate Demon's Souls through rpcs3 at 720p 40-60 fps. It has a button on the side which toggles the built in controller between a "kb+m" mode and a normal controller mode, so I wrote a udev rule which opens Steam in big picture mode if its not running already when I switch to the controller mode.
I also sandbox a bunch of applications installed from the repos (including Steam and Firefox) using bubblewrap instead of using something like Flatpak.
I have a custom (half-working) version of slurp which allows starting selection immediately, which in turn allows me to immediately get the position of the cursor, which I use to launch tofi under the cursor (I don't know of any other way to do this on river or even Wayland in general).
I use secureboot with custom keys (using sbctl), and I build a unified kernel image from which I boot with dracut, into a fairly standard LVM-on-LUKS setup, all flicker-free (by manually turning off Plymouth at the right time). UKIs allow me to boot from an efi shell very easily if thing go very wrong.
I run dnsmasq for caching, together with stubby for DoT. I highly recommend at least dnsmasq if you use Steam (fixes weird issues with their downloads).
I toggle running Qt apps' dark/light mode by modifying the qt5/6ct config file with a perl script which darkman runs. I switch the wallpaper in a similar way.
I don't use a status bar, I put most of what should go there into the Emacs tab bar (with custom dynamic icons and everything). It has volume, battery, temperature, wifi, system load, incoming mail, playing music and time display. Everything but temperature display works on both Linux and OpenBSD (and some on Android too).
Honestly there's a bunch more weird stuff but this is getting pretty long.
I'm not too sure how unusual it is, but I have a satellite tracker on a pi 3 b+ based on satnogs. It helps other scientists get data out of cutsats and other satellites. It's pretty easy to set up once you know what to set up.
I once had a butler program on a pi 1 with WiFi chip back around 10+ years ago. No ai, just a bunch of batch scripts + espeak. It was a cool project that would tell us the weather, time, any to-do items, and internet usage ( att had a hard limit of 100gb and I used a script tu tell how much we used per month). Ran for a couple of years and then disassembled it. Still have the GitHub repo. This was many years before Alexa, Google, and the other such projects. It wasn't better at all (espeak sounds so robotic, even when tweaked).
I ran a Bitcoin miner on a pi and made -$4.50ish a month back a decade ago. It was my most popular wiki pages back when I self hosted one. People were really interested, but it never made any money. It was more of a proof of concept . It's pretty easy to compile, but hard to track down all the dependencies. That was waaaay before the asci miners came into play.
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.
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. :)
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
journactllooks nice. :)
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 8GB VRAM
- NZXT S340 Elite Case
- EVGA 700W BR
- Kicksecure GNU/Linux
Libreboot Server
- Dell Precision T1650
- Xeon E3 1275 V2
- 32GB DDR3L 1600Mhz RAM (ECC)
- 8TB (2x4TB Hard drives) RAID 1 with LUKS and LVM (/boot stored on SD card)
- AMD RX580 8GB VRAM
- Proxmox VE / Learning to use YunoHost inside VM
Libreboot Laptop
- Lenovo Thinkpad T440P
- i7 4810MQ (Recommend i7 4700MQ for better battery life)
- 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
- 1TB SSD (/boot encrypted with Argon2)
- 100% Free BIOS (LibreMRC), Intel Management Engine is still present but neutered
- Intel AC 7260 (Can run without blobs when running Linux-libre kernel)
- AR9271 USB for WiFi (100% FOSS)
- Kicksecure GNU/Linux with Linux-libre kernel (Removed all non-free-firmware with vrms)
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 (100% Free Firmware/Software)
- 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
Probably the weirdest I've done was play doom on a sansa mp3 player with rockbox installed
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
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.
I read through all the comments and its both glorious and frightening. My setup probably is the most vanilla in here…
- Debian 12 + KDE on my daily for work, play and streaming
- Pop_os on asus a15 with 3070m
- Ubuntu Server on an old xeon 4 core which runs many services (plex, homeassistant, pihole, etc)
- LibreELEC on pi4 8 GB connected to my dumbtv in the bedroom
- Ununtu Server on a VPS running 4 fediverse services (lemmy, mastodon, peertube and matrix) a wiki, a forum and surrounding stuff
Probably only the amount of different things is a bit different, otherwise I‘m quite risk averse.
Thanks for reading. Have a good one!
Just started running Arch + KDE on a Kingston Traveller to experiment with setup. Installed from live usb iso and then ran archinstall to the same device.
Runs nicely on my dell xps laptop and my desktop with 3 monitors connected to an Nvidia 1070Ti.
Not THAT unusual, but... I have a Dell R520 server that was leftover/retired from work. I mostly use it for storage due to the amount of disk trays it has. I have all of these disks in a ZFS pool, leaving no actual drives for the OS. However, this was an old VM server, so it has an internal USB 2 port and a ridiculous amount of RAM, so the OS is booted from USB, and I don't use swap.
Boot performance is abysmal (on the rare occasion where I actually need to reboot), but once booted I notice no real downside to having the OS itself on really slow storage. Sure, it's somewhat slow to do os-related stuff such as apt-get, but it's not like I'm in a hurry when doing it. Plus other than updating stuff, the OS storage doesn't see a whole lot of changes/writes.
Now I just need to figure out how to economically attach these 40 additional SAS drives I have. It doesn't have to look good (i.e. fit in the same chassis. Or any chassis at all, for that matter), it just have to work. These additional drives are only 4TB each, but they were free.
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.
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.
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.
I use a very very minimal OpenSuse Tumbleweed KDE but I start the DE manually; startplasma-wayland or startx
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
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 │◄─────────────────┴───────┘ └──────┘ └───────────┘ └─────────┘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
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.
I use Parabola GNU/Linux-libre.
Alpine Linux on my desktop and laptop, Alpine on a Raspberry Pi 3 working as a network/Bluetooth speaker for 5.1 surround speakers, postmarketOS on 2 RockPro64's which I'm currently replacing for a single x86 NAS running Alpine.
I guess my macbookpro from 2009 with Legacy NVIDIA grafics running Arch with GNOME on Wayland is pretty uncommon, lol (Of course using nouveau derivers)
Gentoo gaming and music production rig working through mostly tty with dwm as a graphical display. I typically stay on tty until I want to play a game, use modern web, or record a song. Otherwise tty with Links browser.
Fedora Hyprland, with Floorp and Emacs. Not very unusual, especially when compared to what people are saying here. Umm... floating Waybar and EWW as a conky replacement? A customised Neofetch?
Oh, I got it! I'm using my own handcrafted colourscheme! It's not perfect but it looks very good and is quite nice and blue! And I use Bemenu for a logout menu in a homebrew script.
I'm getting into using Syncthing to synchronise my Notes directory between my devices, which I use on my phone to access my orgmode notes and todo items via an app called Orgzly.
I use a Launcher called Olauncher on my phone which runs LineageOS rooted with KernelSU (that's quite unusual I guess).
My backup solution is 2 USB sticks and Syncthing.
I run the teams-for-linux flatpak for education-related purposes.
Even with all that I still feel like the most Plain Jane user when I'm seeing people using servers and niche distros, even though I'm sure combining it all together will leave us with only 1 user in the world that does things in that exact way: me.
My desktop is a VM with vfio passthough
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!
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I use Microsoft edge
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.
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.
Fedora Cosmic Atomic, not that crazy but pretty usable already.
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
Wow a Raspberry Pi!?! So quirky and unique
