Linux

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!

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 │◄─────────────────┴───────┘        └──────┘      └───────────┘
                           └─────────┘                                                              

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.

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

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.

My desktop is a VM with vfio passthough

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 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.

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.

Wellll, so I practically used to write my own WM