Hello, world!

I’ve been using *nix for a long time now and am an experienced user. Like everyone else in the FOSS community, I was a distro-hopper at first. These days, I utilise GNU/Linux, BSD, or illumos, depending on my use case, and I will pick the best instrument for the job. There are numerous favourites of mine.

I prefer GNU/Linux for my desktop, but for servers, I prefer BSD, particularly OpenBSD ― a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. I like the simplicity of OpenBSD and its sensible and secure defaults; it works immediately without needing additional web server installation. The OpenBSD manpages and the PF firewall are two of my favourite things.

Because I’m a bit paranoid about computer security and privacy, I’ve been using Qubes OS on my laptop daily since 2015. It is a Xen distribution. In the future, there are plans to migrate Qubes OS to a more secure Makatea seL4 or Genode OS Framework etc. I’m running a primarily minimal template ― minimal Debian, minimal Arch Linux, minimal Fedora including OpenBSD for networking and a separate template for compiling stuff for my cloud usage, minimal Gentoo for my mutt e-mail client, mirage firewall and tons of others. DisposableVM is what I use most of the time, with some hardening thrown in for good measure.

If the hardware doesn’t support it (as it does on my PC!) ― I prefer using a standard monolithic Linux distros like Arch Linux (BTW, I use Arch!), Void, Gentoo or immutable Linux distro like NixOS (I like their concept of reproducible builds with custom configs!) or either BSD like HardenedBSD or FreeBSD. I also keep a private poudriere repository on my HardenedBSD machine.

I have several disk drives and machines with several Linux distros, some BSD, some illumos (OpenSolaris fork!) distros (OpenIndiana, OmniOS, Tribblix), and Frankenstein ones like Bedrock Linux.

I’m writing this blog because I have many notes that I have kept while doing things on my end. So, I think it is a good time to write something up in my free time so that I can refer to it later, and maybe some others will find it helpful as well. Feel free to follow me on twitter and contact me through matrix, telegram, or email. Check out the URL links on the main page.

Thanks for reading.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not responsible if any of my blog’s provided configurations or setups break your system. It would be best if you understood what you’re doing, and not by simply copying and pasting.