I really enjoy semi-obscure technologies, and I try implementing many of them into my own computer. So, I thought it would be a little fun to make a little write-up about what components my setup consists of and why they exist.

Setup v1 (as of 2023-07-11)

(I’ll add a diagram here later, but for now, here’s a bullet-point representation)

  • Main desktop
    • Running Fedora Kinoite 38
    • Runs 3 containers (via Toolbx)
      • Dev container
        • Running Fedora 38 (container version)
        • Contains all the additional packages I need for software development
      • Play container
        • Running Fedora 38 (container version)
        • Primarily for running games (on Steam)
      • Utils container
        • Running Alpine Linux Edge (container version)
  • Home server (repurposed old laptop)
    • Running Rocky Linux 9
    • Runs 3 containers (Podman + podman-compose)
      • Nextcloud
      • Penpot
      • Forgejo
    • All 3 containers are connected to a subdomain of mine via Cloudflare Tunnels

As for some personal preferences:

Some explanation

Now that you’ve seen what the setup consist of, I’ll try walking through some of my choices.

Distro choices?

Main desktop

I went with Kinoite due to the following reasons:

  • KDE is just what I’m used to.
  • Containerized workflow
    • If I mess up setting up a new environment for whatever purpose, I can just delete the whole container and start a new one up from my last custom image.
  • Atomic
    • I find the rpm-ostree package manager (?) really cool! I like how I can just pin versions of my system and reboot to them in the future if needed. This also brings about better system stability.
  • Fedora-ish
    • Since prior to this, I’ve been using Fedora 36, 37 and 38, I wanted to still have something from the Fedora ecosystem. I also wanted to have the almost bleeding-edge package updates while maintaining pretty good stability (which is why I didn’t go for RHEL or similar).
  • Why not?
    • Heck, it’s free! And if it’s more complicated, that just means more things to learn :D

Home server

I just wanted something stable so I could just chuck my laptop on a shelf and have it run 24/7 with no issues. From some research, it seemed like RHEL was the gold standard for stability, but since I like open-source, I went with one of its derivatives, Rocky Linux 9.

What’s with my preferences?

…I’m totally not biased towards applications built with Rust…

Nushell

Nushell may not be the most well-supported shell out there, but since I am more of a casual Linux user, I care more about my experience more over raw utility. The main reasons why I just went with nushell is because of the super pretty error messages and the structured responses for many commands.

Additionally, I can couple this with Starship and have super pretty terminal prompts!

Extra: If I ever need to, I can always just type bash and do what I need to do.

Zellij

I previously tried tmux, but didn’t really find it very easy to use. I ended up discovering Zellij from a recommendation, and it basically lets me do everything I need it to do. All the controls are on-screen, so I don’t really have to memorize them.

I’m also not really a multiplexer power user, so just the function of multiple panes is basically the only thing I need.

If I ever need better aesthetics, I also have the option to remove unnecessary portions of the interface to make it look super minimal like tmux.

Alacritty

Although Konsole (the default emulator that comes with KDE Plasma) works, I wanted a little less clutter. Alacritty just works, feels very responsive, and only contains the terminal itself with no extra buttons.