Core: #
- Has to be practical.
- I am not a system admin, don’t need system admin stuff.
- Don’t need it to be overly complex.
- I enjoy the convenience of GUIs and it is ok not to live permanently inside the terminal.
- No over customization. So no ricing.
- It is ok to use proprietary driver blobs as long as they are stable. I try to keep my foot print within what already exists in the Linux kernel.
- Make it work and then worry about it later.
- The stability and the familiarity is what matters, everything else is optional.
Distro type: #
- Don’t want to do Distro hopping.
- Fast and low weight OS.
- Has a decent amount of security patches.
- I control when I want to do updates.
- Remote desktop first, SSH next.
- Need to have Wacom working properly.
- Stay away from Gnome, love cinnamon for low resource VM GUIs.
- Quick and Dirty: Ubuntu, Stable: Debian.
What really matters: #
- Just self host services because i have control over data and avoid duplication.
- Always check the project and the current status of the project, sometime verify the GitHub before hosting it.
- No big deal if I lose them as long as I have backups for the config and data layers.
- Have configs and scripts to restart services when I need them.
- Can run all kinds of Cron jobs. Don’t need a heavy scheduler.
- If it does not work in the end, I should be able to nuke it and start over again. Complete setup needs to be done within half n hour to a hour.
- The “opiniated” rule seems to be Appimage - ok, Flatpacks - better, Snaps - avoid. but it really does not matter, just work with what works and is up to date.