I intend to find a way to make blogging more sustainable so I can increase the frequency of blog posts. For now I am using the Grav web editor, which is okay, but admittedly not as intuitive as Wordpress, nor as simple as a git commit. Anywho.

I have this ongoing obsession with switching up my whole device setup. Phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, server. It's all often in a state of flux, which can be a problem when say your desktop PC changes and you have to re-install all your programs and apps, sync your files etc.

My desk setup landed on a stable configuration recently, which is a setup I can always fall back to if I run into issues.

The setup is:

Desktop

MacBook Air as my main PC connected to my 4K monitor over USB-C with keyboard, mouse, audio, USB-C hub, etc.

Under the desk is/was my gaming PC, which has a HDMI dummy adapter. I can remotely control it with Sunshine desktop streaming and Moonlight on my MacBook. I've tested this setup over time, and it seems to feel quite stable enough, and the video quality is acceptable. Nearly, very nearly the same as a direct connection. You can sometimes see some artefacting, video compression, but rarely. The colour accuracy seems okay, I can see some areas that maybe don't look perfect, but the general experience is great for gaming. I can game at 4K with over 120Hz refresh rate, which seems impressive, but technically quite within the capacity of gigabit Ethernet, and the AMD video encoder built into my AMD RX 9060 XT graphics card.

Move back to Linux on my Desktop

I have made a change recently, which is that I have built up a new desktop PC, separate to my gaming PC, using spare parts. The specs:

• Intel 6400
• 32GB DDR4
• Intel Arc A310 GPU 4GB
• 2TB NVMe

Not super impressive specs, but sufficient for my tasks of software and game development. I have left my gaming PC as it is. I figure, that gaming PC I want to compartmentalise and keep consistent so that it does not change if I can help it. In the past, my desktop gaming PC kept changing OS every month or so. The new desktop PC is currently running Pop!_OS COSMIC, and that could change over time. I found that Debian 13 GNOME is pretty reliable on my gaming PC, but I have not used it much for other tasks yet. If it ever had issues, I would have to try another OS, which I am getting very tired of doing. This new desktop also can connect to the gaming PC with Moonlight, and after some gaming sessions, it works mostly pretty well, with a few framerate glitches, but not too significant. Most of the time, it feels like I am playing 4K 120Hz natively. On an Intel 6400 CPU with a 4GB GPU. I plan to upgrade this desktop a little over time, but for now, it's fine. For example, an easy upgrade would be to drop in a Intel 6700 I can get from eBay pretty cheaply.

Server

For my server, I have switched from a single server that does everything, into two separate machines.

I have a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB running hosted services such as Nextcloud, Immich, Joplin Server and other things. I am aiming to replace Google Docs, OneDrive, etc with self hosted services, to save money and for data sovereignty (I own my data). Some say the maintenance for this setup makes it not worth it, but depends if you are a techie like me who doesn't mind a little tinkering now and then. Ultimately I hope to take the lessons learned to share how to create a stable low maintenance setup.

I also have a NAS (network attached storage) box which hosts my spinning disk HDD storage. For all those obvious home NAS use cases. It's usng a Lenovo desktop PC I picked up on Facebook Marketplace as a trade. I had to use a device other than the Pi, as the Pi frustratingly does not support video encoding for Jellyfin or Plex. Come on Raspberry Pi folks 🤦🏻‍♂️ But the dedicated NAS means I can focus it on being a NAS. It is a part of the Docker Swarm cluster as well, and is running a Minecraft server in a Docker container. In theory, I could spin up other game servers which require an x86 CPU, like Factorio or Team Fortress 2, a game that I still play a little with friends.

Docker Swarm

I am using Docker swarm to host most services, wherever possible. Docker is a very efficient way to host multiple services on one machine, and on the 4GB Raspberry Pi, it all manages to fit under the 4GB RAM ceiling. I previously had an AMD 8 core Proxmox server with 64GB of RAM, and that did run Minecraft, but it often was utilising around 50% of memory. The advantage of Docker Swarm is that you can connect multiple hosts together, and when creating a new service, it can be deployed to any host connected to the Docker Swarm mesh. De-centralised, but with one host being the management host where you deploy things from. I previously wanted to expand Ubuntu LXD into a cluster, but it's not really possible over the Internet, or on a network where IP addresses can change. It was a great step away from Proxmox, which allowed easy creation of LXC containers, and the LXD UI web interface made it easy to use. But it's clustering capabilities were rather inflexible.

AI systems 🤖

Since getting heavily into self hosting, I've also been tinkering with Ollama and OpenWebUI. My AMD RX 9060 XT has 16GB VRAM, which allows me to run more advanced models like GPT-OSS 20b. Generative AI is a highly controversial technology, and while I did have a lot of fun playing around with it, I am now trying to go a bit hands off the cloud stuff, until it is more clear that the tech behind it meets better ethical standards (something for a future blog post). Self-hosting AI is something I can hyper-obsess with, and is a good moral middle ground, for now. Yes the quality of output may not be quite as good as say Claude Sonnet 4.5, but it's not bad. I am hoping to dive deeper into this area and see what is possible with a self hosted setup. I am running OpenWebUI on the Raspberry Pi with Docker, and it connects to Ollama on my gaming PC, which I can switch off to save power. It also has been set up with OpenRouter so I can access cloud models, if I ever wish to. The whole point of it is for local AI though. It's quite a lot of effort to get up and running tools that compete with what's already out there. But this is something I plan to document so that others can have a smoother process.

Stability of this setup

Overall I think I have landed on a setup which should be pretty stable. I think of it like a constellation of devices, with each device dedicated to it's set of purposes. I used to have a gaming PC which was also a workstation, but the frequency of Linux distro hopping meant I had to keep reinstalling games, Hundreds of gigabytes of games. Onto 8TB of SSDs. On NBN Fixed Wireless now, which isn't the worst, at around 200Mbit on average. The Pi and the NAS seem to be good to keep separated, in case of hardware failure. A single point of failure is a problem.

Future possibilities

Docker Swarm does not support self-healing, if a container goes down, it is not replicated on another machine. This is due to the volume data not being replicated. I could implement a sort of volume replication, and scripted auto healing service, so say if my Pi goes down, all of my services could pop up instantly on another host temporarily until the Pi comes back up. There are issues here, like databases that hold things in memory, so there could be workarounds for specific services. The NAS I could rebuild into a box that can hold more HDDs, and perhaps act as a better backups solution that what I currently have (I do have a backup plan..). I could have a new machine dedicated to game servers. Then that can be switched off overnight to save power.

Apple vs Other

Yet again, I am having thoughts about switching back from Apple again. I think I have decided that I am just indecisive, which is a decision. I cannot seem to pick camp Apple or camp Android and Linux, more permanently. So I like to be able to switch between both now and then. But more recently I am being pushed away from Apple because of things like the new Liquid Glass UI. It's not terrible, but it's got to be my least favourite UI update Apple has made since the early 2000s. I remember when everyone made fun of Windows Vista and 8, well.. Where is the noise for Liquid Glass? Maybe they need a revamp like with Vista to 7. I found some great deals on a new Android phone - Motorola Edge 50 Neo, and a Android tablet - Lenovo Idea Tab 11. Both can happily replace my iPhone and iPad Air with keyboard. I have been thinking that Apple are like a safety net fallback, if the alternative doesn't work out. But the alternatives are getting better, for me at least.