Homelab

I keep getting asked which distro someone should run on their daily driver: Arch or NixOS. Usually by people who already run Linux and want a workstation they actually understand, not a black box that updates itself on someone else’s schedule. I’ve run both as my real machine. Not in VMs, not as a weekend experiment. As the laptop where I do professional DevOps and platform engineering work, and as the desktop where I do everything else. So let me state my bias up front, because this framework only works if I’m honest about it: I run Arch on both my desktops today, and I run NixOS on my servers. That tells you where I landed. But I landed there for specific reasons, and I want to walk through them rather than hand you a verdict. ...

Here is the normal we have all quietly accepted. You wake up, your phone has already logged where you slept. You check email on Gmail, search something on Google, message a friend on WhatsApp, pay for coffee with a card, and walk past a dozen cameras before lunch. None of that feels like surveillance. It feels like Tuesday. I want to walk you through why that Tuesday looks very different in 2026 than it did even five years ago, and why I think the comfortable version of privacy (“I have nothing to hide”) has quietly stopped being true. Three things are happening at once, and the combination is what should worry you, not any one piece on its own. ...

In my previous post about self-hosting for everyone I painted a hopeful picture: managed self-hosting where anyone can own their data. I glossed over something that bugs me. Hardware costs money, and the maths works out very differently depending on whether you’re a business or a person. So let me lay out two rules that both sound completely reasonable. Then watch them collide. Rule One: Own Your Hardware This is the whole point of sovereignty. You buy the box, you run the box, nobody can pull your data out from under you. As I argued in Sovereign Infrastructure, I want to understand and control what I run. Renting that from someone else reintroduces exactly the dependency I’m trying to escape. ...

Here is how most people store their digital lives in 2026. Photos go to Google. Email goes to Gmail. Documents go to whatever cloud came bundled with the phone. Passwords sit in a browser owned by an ad company. Every byte lives on someone else’s server, governed by terms nobody read, in a jurisdiction nobody checked. We hand it all over and we call it normal, because the alternative looks like a second job. ...

For a long time, the cloud was just the water I swam in. I provisioned managed Kubernetes, clicked through the console, pasted a Terraform module someone else wrote, and shipped. It worked. Billing landed every month, the dashboards stayed green, and I never once asked what was actually running underneath. I trusted it the way you trust a lift in a building. You press the button and the doors open. ...