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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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Linux users with uncommon or unusual setups: tell us about it (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 months ago by cyclohexane@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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I'll start with mine. yes part of this was to brag about my somewhat but not too unusual setup. But I also wanna learn from your setups!

Anyways: I primarily use Gentoo Linux.

I have two headless servers: a Raspberry Pi 4B and a Oracle cloud VM (free tier). Both running OpenRC, and both were running mainline kernel with custom config (I recently switched the Pi to PiFoundation kernel due to some issues). The raspberry pi boots from SSD and has no sd card inserted.

Both servers were running musl libc instead of glibc for a while. This gave me a couple of random issues, but eventually I got tired and switched back to glibc.

I have a desktop running gentoo and a laptop running arch, but hoping to switch the laptop to gentoo soon.

Both are daily driving wayland (the desktop had nvidia card and used for gaming). The desktop is running a kernel with a minimal config that compiles in 2-3 minutes.

What's your unusual setup like?

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[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What's the deal with / as tmpfs about? I'm so trying to understand nixos.

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 8 months ago

NixOS can boot from a file system that only has /nix, since essentially the kernel command line has init=/nix/store/.../init. Everything else will be created during boot by that if it isn't already there. So technically you could only mount /nix and you would get a blank system every time you boot (but that wouldn't be very useful in most cases). Mounting these is done in the initrd.

A lot of people have a setup where only select files are mounted from a persistent partition, such as /var/lib/postgresql, basically anything they want to keep across reboots, so that the rest is discarded when they reboot. This prevents the system from accumulating junk over time, from services you once used to have but no longer have running, and so on. Personally I found it too much of a hassle to keep track of what files I want to keep, so I save the entire /etc and /var. I still keep the tmpfs though because it's pretty cool.