Uses
Inventory
Every so often someone asks what I run. This is the honest answer, printed by the machine rather than remembered by me — and, underneath it, the shelf of things I chose on purpose.
Two boxes, and only one of them is interesting to look at.
The desktop is a Ryzen 7 5800X that has been in service long enough to be unremarkable, attached to a graphics card that is much newer than it and two ultrawides that do not match. The mismatch is the honest part: one is a 144 Hz panel bought on purpose and the other is a 60 Hz panel that was already here, and I have never been annoyed enough to fix it.
Yes, the swap is full. It has been full for most of those 39 days, the machine is fine, and I have decided this is a personality trait rather than a problem.
The box in the closet is a TrueNAS build doing the unglamorous half: eight four-terabyte drives in RAIDZ2 for anything I would be upset to lose, a pair of SSDs for anything that needs to be quick about it, and a 3060 whose entire job is running models locally so the desktop does not have to stop what it is doing. It is the quiet dependency under a lot of what shows up on this site.
The full story of that machine — why TrueNAS, what broke, what I would buy again — is its own piece of writing rather than a row in a table. The terminals above only claim to tell you what the hardware is; the shelves under them are the part I actually chose.
ryan@RITXF:~$fastfetch
- OS
- Nobara Linux 43 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition) x86_64
- Host
- MS-7C92 (1.0)
- Kernel
- Linux 6.19.2-200.nobara.fc43.x86_64
- Uptime
- 39 days, 22 mins
- Packages
- 3771 (rpm), 21 (flatpak-system), 20 (flatpak-user)
- Shell
- bash 5.3.0
- WM
- niri (Wayland)
- Terminal
- ghostty
- Display
- LG HDR WQHD - 3440x1440 in 34", 60 Hz [External]
- Display
- LG 34GP950G - 3440x1440 in 35", 144 Hz [External]
- CPU
- AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (16) @ 4.85 GHz
- GPU
- AMD Radeon RX 9070 [Discrete]
- Memory
- 30.41 GiB / 62.71 GiB (48%)
- Swap
- 8.00 GiB / 8.00 GiB (100%)
- Disk (/)
- 799.07 GiB / 1.32 TiB (59%) - btrfs
- Icons
- Papirus
- Cursor
- Nordic (24px)
ryan@RITXF:~$
Captured .
truenas:~$specs
- CPU
- Intel Core i5-8500
- GPU
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB
- Memory
- 32 GB
- Boot pool
- 1 x 64 GB
- Fast pool
- 2 x 1 TB SSD
- Bulk pool
- 8 x 4 TB HDD, RAIDZ2 - 24 TB usable
truenas:~$
Captured .
The desktop
The hardware is unremarkable and the session is not. This is the part I have opinions about.
Fedora, with the media codecs and driver patches already applied.
It says KDE Plasma Desktop Edition on the tin because that is the image I installed. Very little of Plasma survived.
A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.
Windows live on an infinite strip instead of being packed into a screen-sized grid, which turns out to be the tiling model I stop fighting.
The shell — bar, launcher, notifications — running on top of niri.
Its launcher takes plugins, which is how I ended up writing one that searches a Bitwarden vault.
The icon theme.
Terminal and shell
Displays
The two panels in the fastfetch output above, in the order I look at them.
LG 34GP950G
34-inch ultrawide, 3440x1440, 144 Hz.
The one bought on purpose.
LG HDR WQHD
34-inch ultrawide, 3440x1440, 60 Hz.
The one that was already here, per the paragraph above about never being annoyed enough to fix it.
Writing and building this site
The closet
The half of the setup nobody should have to watch.
The storage OS on the box in the closet.
Eight drives in RAIDZ2 for anything I would be upset to lose, and two SSDs for anything that needs to be quick about it.
An RTX 3060, 12 GB
The card in that box.
Its entire job is running models locally so the desktop does not have to stop what it is doing.
This page is one file, so every change to the setup is a commit against it.Read the diffs on GitHub.
