Linux

My neighbour is 70 years old. He’s been using Windows his entire life. Last month he asked me: “Tom, I keep hearing about Linux. Is that something for me too?” He’s not the first. Over the past year, friends, family and colleagues have asked me the same thing in different shapes. “I want to get off Windows, but I don’t know where to start.” “Is Linux hard?” “Can I still use my normal programs?” To me these questions seem obvious. I’ve been running Linux since SuSE 6.0, back when you had to specifically pick hardware components that actually had Linux drivers. To someone who’s never seen a terminal, they feel genuinely daunting. ...

I run VMs constantly. Testing Kubernetes deployments, trying out a distro I read about, running Windows for that one stubborn application, isolating an experiment so I don’t wreck my actual machine. KVM/QEMU is the right tool for all of it. Near-native performance, completely open source, baked straight into the Linux kernel. Nothing to phone home, nothing to license, no vendor deciding what I’m allowed to do with my own hardware. ...

A cryptographic signature is one of the few things online that still means exactly what it says. If the key is yours and the signature verifies, the content came from you. Full stop. No vendor handed you this identity, no CA can pull it, no platform can suspend it. It exists because you generated the key, and it stays yours for exactly as long as you hold the private half. Most of what we casually call “online identity” is borrowed: a handle someone can ban, a checkmark someone can strip, an email address a domain owner can take back the day they feel like it. A GPG signature lives outside all of that. The key that signed this paragraph is either yours or it belongs to someone else, and nobody gets a vote. ...

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? ...