Home Server
I run a home server I call nousowl—a small, headless Fedora box for the parts of my work that belong on my own hardware. I use it most for curriculum development: a private Carnap instance where I edit logic assignments over SSH and watch the interactive exercises render instantly in the browser—something like an Overleaf for logic homework. It also serves a static site or two and doubles as my testbed for self-hosting. The server keeps its own page, which says far more than I would here: nousowl.net.
Configs & Automation
My configuration files and scripts live in a public configs repository. The idea is to keep my whole working environment – shell, editor, window manager, terminal, even my LaTeX macros – as version-controlled text in one place, rather than hand-tuning each machine. GNU Stow handles the install, symlinking each piece into the spot its program expects, so a freshly set-up machine becomes “mine” with a clone and a single command. Some of it is Linux- or Fedora-specific, and the READMEs try to flag what’s what—as much for my own future reference as for anyone else. The rest is small glue: a pair of commands that sync every repository across my laptop and desktop, a make target that builds and smartens the site you’re reading, and a deploy script that ships course material up to nousowl.
Linux
The approximate story of my Linux journey, as seen on and saved from Twitter years ago:
I began experimenting with Linux before Pop was a thing, and although Manjaro existed I never heard of it until a few years ago; and there are some others there that I couldn’t identify by the logo. But it’s true that I began with Ubuntu, which at the time was the premier desktop distribution; these days I think it’s Fedora. For me, the peak of Mount Stupid was indeed Kali and Qubes, and the Valley of Despair was indeed Arch. I ultimately made my way back through Lubuntu – which I loved before LXQt replaced LXDE – and then Debian – which is still too bare and backwards for many nice features – finally converging back on Fedora, the greatest balance of all the things you could ever ask for in a desktop distribution. When people tell me they’re interested in using Linux, I tell them to use Fedora and never stop using Fedora.
Although I do continue to have nagging thoughts that Arch is the Way…. It probably is – it’s certainly the most fun – but it’s a time-sink. I have dreams of making my own personalized Arch distribution—but no. Lots of scripts and total distribution-independence is the way. I think this is what most fascination with Arch is, really: the desire for it.
Preferred Applications
- Editor: Neovim. My configuration can be found here. I’ve done a bit configuring Emacs, too, but I honestly got addicted to the keystrokes when I started using Neovim. See here for more details. I use VimTeX for LaTeX, but I’m extremely partial to my own snippets over the automatically-generated ones. I have some other nice plugins for other purposes, too.
- Desktop Environment: I’ve been partial to GNOME for years; the out-of-the-box Fedora Workstation experience is too good. But lately I’m using Sway (the Wayland successor to i3) on my laptop a lot.
- Terminal Emulator: I’ve been using both WezTerm and Alacritty, although I am partial to WezTerm.
- Diff and Merge GUI: Meld. This is useful to me not so much for managing code but for managing article drafts that were forked for various reasons.
- Email, cloud storage, VPN, password manager: Proton. I pay the $100/year or whatever. Proton is awesome. You get what you pay for. Read about its history here.
- Image Editor: Although I’m not big into editing photos, I do end up using GIMP quite a bit. These days it might feel lacking compared to editors that have AI-integration, but for my purposes it’s entirely adequate. In fact, I’ve never found a limitation in GIMP.
Honorable Mentions: I do use Thunderbird for email, although less because Thunderbird is so great and more because it’s the best there is in Linux. I also occasionally use LibreOffice applications – especially Calc (which is like Google Sheets or Excel) – which actually is fairly good software. I can’t imagine anything Microsoft Word or Google Docs has over LibreOffice other than cloud integration. I suppose I might also mention Okular here—KDE’s PDF viewer. I use it only because it’s the best Linux has to offer, but it is quite good.