Linux

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.

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.

On my desktop I use 2 virtual audio devices that are linked to my real audio card with qpwgraph in order to split audio between VoIP applications and desktop/game audio.

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 journactl looks nice. :)

Not sure how unusual it is but I run openwrt x86 on a fanless Asus mini PC as my main router at home.

Probably the weirdest I've done was play doom on a sansa mp3 player with rockbox installed

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 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.

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.

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

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.

Arch on 2019 MacBook Pro (16-inch) with MaXX Interactive Desktop.

My casual-browsing-only netbook is currently running on a RAID0 setup between the internal eMMC and the microSD card because I think it's funnier that way. Nothing useful's stored on there and it's one nixos-rebuild away from being reinstalled so I don't mind the inevitable breakage.

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 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 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 think my most unusual step os to select dvoark keyboard layout. Otherwise I'm pretty vanilla.

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.

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.

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)

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!

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.

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:

https://gitlab.com/that1communist/dotfiles/

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.