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. In quarters when I’m teaching logic it tilts heavily toward curriculum development: a private Carnap instance where I stage assignments before students see them. I write the Carnap files in my editor, deploy them with a one-line script, and watch them render in the browser as the interactive, self-checking problems students actually meet—something like an Overleaf for developing Carnap files. The rest of what it does runs year-round: Sylloge – a journal-tracking tool of my own – a small private Zulip chatroom, and the static site it serves. All of it 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
Many of my configuration files and scripts live in my 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.
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 used to 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 total distribution-independence.
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 use WezTerm, although I have experimented with Ghostty, kitty, and Alacritty. Alacritty is an excellent minimal terminal, although it is too minimal for me; if I were to ever switch off of WezTerm I would likely choose between Ghostty and kitty.
- 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.