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Ask most people how to run a “real” hypervisor at home and you get the same shortlist: VMware, Hyper-V, or at minimum Proxmox. Something with a web UI, a clustering tab, a marketing page full of enterprise features. That mental model is so common that running virtual machines without one of those products feels like cutting corners. We’ve quietly accepted that serious virtualization comes with a vendor attached. Now flip it. The thing doing the actual work in all of those products is a Linux kernel module that has been production-grade for over a decade. KVM with libvirt gives you live migration, memory ballooning, CPU pinning, GPU passthrough, SR-IOV, nested virtualization. The features the glossy hypervisors advertise are kernel features. The web UI is a wrapper around them. ...

I’ve written about Talos Linux as the immutable Kubernetes OS, and I’ve compared Arch vs NixOS for workstations. One question keeps landing in my inbox after both: what about NixOS for the Kubernetes nodes themselves? It’s a fair question, because on paper these two look like siblings. NixOS and Talos are both declarative. Both can be immutable. Both put your configuration under version control. So why pick one over the other to run a cluster? ...

Here is how most of us run Kubernetes nodes. You install a general-purpose Linux distro, harden it with a CIS benchmark script, add an SSH key, set up a config management tool to keep drift in check, and then spend the next two years SSH-ing in to fix the things the config management tool didn’t catch. Every node is a little snowflake with its own history. We’ve accepted this as normal. ...

Here is how most of us ship software in 2026. You pick a framework, pull in a few hundred dependencies, and your service idles at a gigabyte of RAM before it does a single useful thing. Nobody profiles it. Nobody asks why. If it’s slow, you scale up. Compute is cheap, your time is expensive, and the bill goes to someone else. We’ve accepted this as normal. I used to live in a different world. I’d spend hours, sometimes whole weekends, squeezing every last byte out of code. Getting a program to run on hardware that “couldn’t possibly” handle it was the best feeling I knew. My inspiration was the demoscene: impossible visual effects rendered in 64 kilobytes or less. I’d watch one and just sit there asking myself, how on earth did they do that? ...

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. ...