I ended up just building a box after looking for the perfect NAS and finding it didn’t exist. The software is usually just crap or the hardware is underwhelming. Got a Node 804 case to slap in plenty of HDD space. Running NixOS so I’m in control of the software. In retrospect I wish I had gotten a rackmount type case. Tossed in an Arc GPU for better transcoding shortly after the initial setup.
Major desktop environments are KDE as you mentioned and Gnome.
Arch wiki is a good resource even if not running arch. You may want to look into their dotfiles page to back up your settings: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dotfiles.
NixOS ended up being my distro of choice for reproducible installs but it has a high learning curve and poor documentation so I wouldn’t recommend to start with. That said you can still use Nix on other distros with home manager to manage dotfiles and install non-system apps.
Distros just pick the default things to install. You can always use the package manager to install something else like a better file manager.
A lot of choices are simply subjective so its hard to recommend any one distro. Mint is close to windows, based on Ubuntu and uses Gnome. Ubuntu based on Debian I find to be user friendly. Not used a Fedora based distro in ages but there is also Silverblue I’ve heard mentioned positively.
Distros like Arch and NixOS are more design your own system setups. Pick what you want. I used arch for a bit, but got annoyed at keeping all my systems in sync. Had a huge wiki of all the tweaks I made. Then scripts to automate some of it. I started looking at automation tooling like ansible when I found nix.
Less public / archived spaces as well. Videogame lobbies were rampant with Trump / MAGA messaging in 2019. Not sure what its like now as I quit all online gaming. Anyone 14-17 during that period who are now of voting age has likely gotten a massive dose of right wing propaganda.
I’m both experienced and know jack shit because there is just too much to learn. I just started using it (1998ish) to make cool looking UIs. Its been my daily driver for 15 years now.
You will never learn it all. Over time you may become more familiar with the terminal or you may not. Doesn’t matter. You do you.
Its pretty easy to test drive. Grab a distros “Live CD” version, put in on a thumb drive, reboot and play around. This wont be persistent. When you’re ready, install it on an external SSD. Play around some more now that your edits will be persistent. You’ll mess up. Take notes. Start again once you’ve hosed your system.
This is why we trust but verify. Thanks mom for teaching me that cruel lesson of unplugging the phone cord to get me to bed (dial up days). It lasted about a week before I caught on you always came up from the basement before bed.
I’m so glad you never noticed I swapped my line with the guest bedroom. Also glad that ancient block in the basement could be hand wired.
For the networking I found some repos with Nix and Gluetun (OCI containers). I don’t see them in my bookmarks, so it was probably a day project when I set up and didn’t keep the references.
That part is still in docker / podman. So any docker network guide just needs to be translated to nix.
Best resource I’ve found is searching GitHub.
My setup closely follows https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config.
For servarr I just translated someone else’s docker compose setup to nix. There are some ready made nix ones you can look at like https://github.com/rasmus-kirk/nixarr/tree/main/nixarr.
The complex networking I just picked up over time once I knew my way around a little bit.
GitHub is your best resource. lang:nix search terms.
I wouldn’t run NixOS in a container. With native nix containers I’m pretty sure they share the store. For docker I’d use images built with nix (doesn’t run nix itself) or pull from docker hub.
OS: NixOS (high learning curve but its been worth it). Nix (the config language) is a functional programming language, so it can be difficult to grok. Documentation is shit as its evolved while maintaining backwards compatibility. If you use the new stuff (Nix Flakes) you have to figure what’s old and likely not applicable (channels or w/e).
BYOD: Just using LVM. All volumes are mirrored across several drives of different sizes. Some HDD volumes have an SSD cache layer on top (e.g., monero node). Some are just on an SSD (e.g., main system). No drive failures yet so can’t speak to how complex restoring is. All managed through NixOS with https://github.com/nix-community/disko.
I run stuff on a mix of OCI containers (podman or docker, default is podman which is what I use) and native NixOS containers which use systemd-nspawn.
The OS itself I don’t back up outside of mirroring. I run an immutable OS (every reboot is like a fresh install). I can redeploy from git so no need to backup. I have some persistent BTRFS volumes mounted where logs, caches, and state go. Don’t backup, but I swap the volume every boot and keep the last 30 days of volumes or a min of at least 10 for debugging.
I just use rclone for backups with some bash scripts. Devices back up to home lab which backs up to cloud (encrypted with my keys) all using rclone (RoundSync for phone).
Runs Arrs, Jellyfin, Monero node, Tor entry node, wireguard VPN (to get into network from remote), I2C, Mullvad VPN (default), Proton VPN (torrents with port forwarding use this), DNS (forced over VPN using DoT), PiHole in front of that, three of my WiFi vlans route through either Mulvad, I2C, or Tor. I’ll use TailsOS for anything sensitive. WiFi is just to get to I2C or Onion sites where I’m not worried about my device possibly leaking identity.
Its pretty low level. Everything is configured in NixOS. No GUIs. If its not configured in nix its wiped next reboot since the OS is immutable. All tracked in git including secrets using SOPS. Every device has its own master key setup on first install. I have a personal master key should I need to reinstall which is tracked outside of git in a password manager.
Took a solid month to get the initial setup done while learning NixOS. I had a very specific setup of LVM > LUKS encryption /w Secure Boot and Hardware Key > BTRFS. Overkill on security but I geek out on that stuff. Been stable but still tinkering with it a year later.
I’ve been getting weird walking instructions. Like 6 min walk is +30 to avoid some invisible barrier.
Download 5 seasons of some show from multiple sources or some artist’s entire discography, and want to normalize all the file names? It is way easier in the terminal.
I’ll check this out, but I use https://github.com/stevearc/oil.nvim for such tasks as I have nvim’s full suite of editor commands to rename all the files way faster than I could in a GUI. I’m sure there are GUI apps to perform a similar task, but I already know how to use nvim.
Let em fight it out!
Ruling class does it all the time. Keep citizens enraged on issues of race, gender, religion, sports, and so on so they are distracted from realising the one true war of ruling class vs everybody else.
/s in a sense that shit flung at the ruling class tends to roll downhill. If nestle loses a bunch of money, they will raise prices to keep the infinite growth machine running. If Russia steals a bunch of money, they have more capital for weapons.
Its kind of lose/lose for us :(
I haven’t made a keyboard in awhile but anything that supports QMK (or whatever is new and shiny today) should be able to support this.
QMK and the like are custom firmware so you can pretty much code up whatever feature you need.
If you are looking for a pre-built, I know my Tofu65 supports QMK from https://kbdfans.com/.
QMK is written in C but they do have a no code tool I used for my Tofu65: https://config.qmk.fm/#/.
If the tool doesn’t cover your use case and you are able to do a little C, these sections are good starting points for layers (what you call modes) and cursor keys.
My work laptop is a Dell Precision. It was a “data science” model that came with Ubuntu. Wiped Dell’s modified Ubuntu and put vanilla Ubuntu on it and now running Nixos. Works great. There was a weird period when using triple monitors with their dock had an intermittent issue on boot where resolutions and monitors were not being detected. Cause was Nvidia drivers. It eventually got resolved and it was easy enough to rollback the drivers to one that worked.
Yeah I don’t want locally deleted media (to free up space) to sync those deletions to my remote.
My crypted remotes wrap a B2 Backblaze one which doesn’t delete, just hides. Periodically I go clean it up.
You are correct, fixed!
https://github.com/newhinton/Round-Sync. Not in any app store and have to download and install from GitHub.
It is an Android wrapper around rsync rclone.
Setup a remote, setup tasks, and setup triggers. Mine syncs every night. It supports encrypting with your own keys. Large number of remotes supported from self-hosted to cloud.
Immutable Nixos. My entire server deployment from partitioning to config is stored in git on all my machines.
Every time I boot all runtime changes are “wiped”, which is really just BTRFS subvolume swapping.
Persistence is possible, but I’m forced to deal with it otherwise it will get wiped on boot.
I use LVM for mirrored volumes for local redundancy.
My persisted volumes are backed up automatically to B2 Backblaze using rclone. I don’t backup everything. Stuff I can download again are skipped for example. I don’t have anything currently that requires putting a process in “maint mode” like a database getting corrupt if I backup while its being written to. When I did, I’d either script gracefully shutting down the process or use any export functionality if the process supported it.
Been using Nix for just over a year.
Seconding to go with flakes. No idea wtf channels are or whatever the previous system was.
Documentation can be confusing due to changes in paradigms. The bare “nix <scope>” seems to be the most modern oppose to “nix-<scope>” (e.g., nix store vs nix-store). That said, not every feature can be found in the newer variants.
This can make following tutorials difficult if they aren’t using the same paradigm.
Getting comfortable with the nix language will be helpful. Its a functional programming language, which is very different than languages like bash.
Not everything has to be done the nix-way. My nvim files are in the same repo, but I just outOfStoreSymlink them instead of wrapping them in a derivation.
Some useful packages I like not already shared.
Disk partitioning: https://github.com/nix-community/disko
Immutable: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence - Pretty much resets the system to a new install every boot. Discourages manual tweaks via sudo as they get wiped out. You can still mark certain directories to be persistent (logs, personal documents, steam games, etc.).
Nvfetcher: https://github.com/berberman/nvfetcher - Nix has a concept of overlays. You can pretty much override anything with .override (module args or inputs) and .overrideAttrs (module attribute set or outputs). Nvfetcher helps with checking different sources so you can override a packages src attribute. Why is this useful? So you can install any version you want and are not bound to nixpkgs. That doesn’t mean the install script in nixpkgs will always work on newer versions, but those can be overridden as well if needed.
Note that disko, impermanence, and nvfetcher all have a flake.nix in the root of the repo. Those provide ready to go overlays so you don’t have to deal with writing your own which is really nice if you want to latest version without much work when available.