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?

  • 2xsaiko
    25•9 months ago

    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
    • @[email protected]English
      4•9 months ago

      This is apparently very unusual since a lot of games completely break with it but two monitors with the main monitor on the right

      This is unusual? I use the same monitor configuration, and I didn’t notice any problems with it. Or at least I didn’t figure out they could have been caused by monitor setup. Could you give me an example of what problems have you encountered?

      • 2xsaiko
        1•9 months ago

        Either games spawning on the wrong monitor and not reacting well to you moving the fullscreen window to the other monitor, or mouse input issues. Latest I’ve had was L.A. Noire, which locks the mouse to a portion of the screen and doesn’t allow you to freely turn the camera. (I just tested it again and now it seems to work fine though! I hope that persists.) Quake II doesn’t allow you to move the mouse at all, or rather only in what seems in like a 2 pixel wide boundary in the middle of the screen. No such issues if the other monitor is turned off or configured to be on the right side. I’ve encountered more games that had issues with this in the past but these two are the recent ones I’ve had trouble with since setting it up like this again.

        • LiveLMEnglish
          3•9 months ago

          If you’re on Wayland, try gamescope. It’s basically built to handle issue like this.

          • 2xsaiko
            4•9 months ago

            With L.A. Noire, that actually made it worse. It spawned on the wrong monitor, and every time I moved the mouse, the camera would spin to the right no matter what (even with only one monitor, I think). I need to get around to making bug reports for these.

    • LiveLMEnglish
      4•9 months ago

      Question: are you using Flakes?

      I’ve been kinda dipping my toes on NixOS but the flakes are really throwing a wrench my way… Yet they are apparently NixOS’ future so I’m just kinda stuck

      • 2xsaiko
        6•9 months ago

        Yeah. Flakes are essentially three things (or four if you count the new CLI):

        1. Lock files for inputs (like NPM)
        2. A defined output layout (so, every flake has its packages at packages.<system> for example)
        3. Pure mode (don’t worry about it unless you read from arbitrary locations in the file system or try to download files without a hash)

        That’s it, essentially nothing else changes. It’s just a different entry point to Nix code including NixOS configurations.

        Here’s a great article (apparently, I have only skimmed it myself) explaining flakes more in detail: https://jade.fyi/blog/flakes-arent-real/

      • @[email protected]
        6•9 months ago

        Flakes on the system level aren’t too bad. You can pretty much just keep your configuration.nix, but now you call that from a flake.nix. The difference is you remove all your nix-channels and you specify your nixpkgs in your flake.nix. So its really using a flake instead of nix-channels.

        The cool part is when you nixos-rebuild the first time, it will save your nixpkgs version in a flake.lock. Then it will stay that way until you choose to upgrade with nix flake update. Nice and stable.

    • qaz
      3•9 months ago

      A fellow en_DK user, I thought I was the only one.

      • 2xsaiko
        6•9 months ago

        NixOS can boot from a file system that only has /nix, since essentially the kernel command line has init=/nix/store/.../init. Everything else will be created during boot by that if it isn’t already there. So technically you could only mount /nix and you would get a blank system every time you boot (but that wouldn’t be very useful in most cases). Mounting these is done in the initrd.

        A lot of people have a setup where only select files are mounted from a persistent partition, such as /var/lib/postgresql, basically anything they want to keep across reboots, so that the rest is discarded when they reboot. This prevents the system from accumulating junk over time, from services you once used to have but no longer have running, and so on. Personally I found it too much of a hassle to keep track of what files I want to keep, so I save the entire /etc and /var. I still keep the tmpfs though because it’s pretty cool.