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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Debian testing on a MacBook Air 6,2 (2013). I guess that's kinda weird. Works fine as a netbook: Firefox, Thunderbird, TigerVNC (handles the low resolution well) and SSH. That's all I ask of the thing and it works fine. The only hardware that doesn't work is the webcam, everything else is 100%
It was a free hand-me-down and I put a $45 battery in it so I can use it on the couch. I think what will kill it is when the proprietary charger dies, they cost more used on ebay than the battery did.
I think my most unusual step os to select dvoark keyboard layout. Otherwise I'm pretty vanilla.
There's another one of us! Quick! Take a picture!
I've only met one other person that knew who/what Dvorak was/is, and also reportedly used that keyboard layout.
I struggled with getting lost on the keyboard (several family members have dyslexia and ADHD--I'm not sure if that is related or not), and as an experiment spent 4 months exclusively using that layout to force myself to learn.
They never told me how my brain was also only big enough for a single keyboard layout. Usually in windows, games map to the same keys automagically. On Linux, not so much. I'm constantly remapping controls because I can't be bothered to just have two keyboard layouts I swap between for games /facepalm
I use Dvorak too! Have it configured on a custom mechanical keyboard so I don't have to change anything in the OS either.
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.
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.
My desktop is a VM with vfio passthough
Gentoo + OpenRC + TDE (therefore X) on both a first-gen Threadripper desktop with 96GB RAM and a laptop from 2008 with an Athlon64x2 processor and 2GB RAM. Updating gcc on the laptop can take a while, but it still serves well enough. Plus a couple of headless Pis that are also running Gentoo. Not overly unusual, but I may well have the only Threadripper of that gen running that specific distro and DE combination anywhere in the world, since each individual item is kind of low probability.
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:
Well my unusual setup I spent years thinking about it before I was even able to have the money to achieve it. It's based on portability and versatility and since I'm now working remotely now it makes even more sense. The plan was to run something portable with less power and smaller when outside, and leave the powerhouse to be accessed remotely. So for that reason I have a dualboot Oneplus 6 with LineageOS and Droidian, Waydroid container on Droidian and Debian proot-distro on LineageOS. That so i dont have to totally reboot for some tasks i might need on android or linux. 4 media folders shared between both of them as well as their containers. This makes sense now cause i long thought of running a Lapdock with it even if only wireless, and I got it recently! It works really nice on android but cant transmit over miracast on linux yet, still figuring that out. Nevertheless thats not the main device that is on my mind. A pinephone pro is a good fit too, but im leaning towards something like the gpd pocket 3, a real portable and modular mini pc that could be connected with just a cable to work better on the lapdock (also can be used as a tablet which is dope).
The powerhouse itself is a server with 16 threads of cpu and 64gb of ram and 2 gtx 1060s for graphics that i plan on configuring with vgpu to split graphical load between the vms with. It is also my remote gaming server :D with moonlight and sunshine, and i spent quite some time configuring all of it to be easily almost plug and play with controllers to have no issues if i disconnect or using multiple different controllers, with a good game launcher (Playnite) to host all games from it.
All of this just to someday achieve my dream of working wherever I want with a camper van to explore the world!
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.
Qubes OS counts as an unusual setup, right? Maybe even more unusual, I used to use Proxmox on my desktop PC, and I ran Debian and Arch on top of that. Also a little unusual, I use a MacBook Pro with Asahi Linux (actually the Fedora Asahi Remix).
Not sure if it counts, but I'll share it anyways.
I use a chromebook which has two Linux containers running on it. One of them I'm experimenting with learning Docker and possibly selfhosting some things there. Only running one thing right now, and it seems to be going fine.
The other container is my main Linux "install", which has all my apps like Inkscape, VSCode, Kdenlive, etc. The container uses a mix of nix, flatpak, and apt for installing things, which I do want to try and consolidtae eventually.
Probably not the weirdest of them all, but I do think it's pretty cool to run all this on a chromebook.
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.
Oracle cloud VM (free tier)
Remember to back that shit up rigorously, as Oracle is known to terminate free accounts with no warning (....which is fair for a free account imo)
You probably already know this but I thought I'd say it just in case
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.
Not sure if this counts, but on my install of nobara whenever I hover over an icon in the home bar it relocates to the bottom left corner of the screen, leaving an empty space. I can still interact with apps by clicking on the empty space where the icon used to be so it doesn't brick my home bar, it's just really annoying.
Irubn Bluefin which is a downstream of Fedora built to be more Dev focused and "cloud native". Desktops apps are flatpak first, my terminal just opens distrobox containers, system CLI tools I get from nixpkgs, services i run on a k3s service on it, and I have use vscodiunm with gitpods to support devcontainers hosted on the k3s cluster. I sometimes pxeboot a raspberry pi or another laptop or a server from my openwrt router to add compute to the cluster if I need it.
Been tinkering with, well, Tinkerbell to do the pxe booting from the k3s cluster but I may go back to Metal3 so I can just used the servers BMCs and do the extra work to config the pxe boot from there.
I really want to get it too full distributed desktop OS at some point, either using moonlight or some real systems work with RDMAoCE and tricking the processes into thinking they are on the same system. That one feel very RnD though.