Lately I’ve been itching to rework my homelab. As I pack up my bindle, I want to take an accounting of the frustrations and pain points in my current setup. Context My current homelab came about when I had just bought my first serious single-board server: an ODROID H3+. It blew my old Raspberry Pi out of the water, and I was stoked to get my hands on something with Quick Sync so I could finally build the media server of my dreams.

One thing I’ve always found cumbersome about configuring a tiling window manager is dealing with all the extra programs you need to launch on startup. Most WMs have a config setting for running one-off commands to start your status bar, set your background, and so on. This feels like an afterthought and is a pain to debug when one of those programs inevitably crashes. The solution? systemd. I was browsing the documentation for niri the other day and noticed this handy page.

Preface For years, I’ve wanted to build a Steam Box: a generic PC, repurposed into a Steam-powered gaming console. Prior to the advent of the Steam Deck, there had been two long-standing issues that kept me from making this happen. The first blocker was Linux game compatibility. Plenty of ink has been spilled already on Proton and how it has changed the Linux gaming landscape; I don’t think I need to add to that.

In spring of 2021 I migrated my laptop configuration over to NixOS, a stateless Linux distribution backed by the purely functional package manager, Nix. My configuration is split between two repositories: a base NixOS config that contains all of my core utilities, and my home-manager configuration, which has all the graphical tools, scripts, and quality-of-life tweaks that I rely on day-to-day. Note: These two repos are loosely coupled, as my dwm build (which is included in the main configuration) has bindings for several of the scripts and programs that are bundled in my home-manager config.