Inspiration for this page came from Mike Sass at Shellsharks.

Desk setup

• IKEA Trotten sit/stand desk
• Monitor Dell U3818DW > USB-C power delivery with a modern Macbook (M1) is broken, don't buy this
• Ergotron HX monitor arm
• HumanCentric vertical laptop stands
• Kantu YU4 speakers
• Scyrox v8
• KeyChron Q1 Max
• PinePower 120W
• Logitech G305 mouse > best mouse for the money
• GMMK Pro keyboard > switches and board stopped working

Computers

Workstation

I do most of my work on this machine in addition to hosting several Podman containers. With NixOS and Podman I can create containers for things like Ollama and Open WebUI and pass the Nvidia GPU to the container. You can see some examples here.

Random test

Here is the subheading #3.

Laptop

I snagged an XPS 13 Plus refurbished from Micro Center in preparation for SANS SEC617. I've since replaced the hard drive with a Samsung 980 professional, re-pasted with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, and added a cheap matte screen protector. Currently running Ubuntu.

This is the second 'Linux Certified' Dell that I've purchased and my overall experience is positive. Everything works out of the box on Ubuntu, e.g. sound, wifi, touch, haptic row, and fingerprint).

Software

• Linux
• Git
• Libvirt, kvm, qemu
• Obsidian
• SwayWM
• TMUX
• VIM Motions + VSCode

Lab Configuration

My homelab contains two consumer desktops. The Fractal Meshify-C (top) runs Proxmox and the Rosewill 4U (bottom) runs TrueNAS SCALE. A Cisco SG350 and pfSense are the network's backbone. Lab networking goes through a virtualized OPNsense. PiKVM for IPMI. Hardware details:

• Proxmox: 12600K, 32GB, 1TB+2TB NVME, 1080TI
• TrueNAS: 8700K, 64GB, 1TB+500GB NVME, 4x2TB RAIDZ1
• Wireless by TPLINK EAP660
• Cisco SG350 switch