After a few… let’s say enthusiastic iterations of installing Arch Linux (we don’t count installs, we count character development), I finally started piecing together something resembling a usable system. This wasn’t just an OS install this was a rite of passage. The kind of journey where you emerge from your tiling window manager blinking into the light of a fully functional system, dotfiles in one hand, terminal in the other. The catalyst for this chaos? None other than Mischa yes, that Mischa. You know the one: the guru of minimalism, the k8s whisperer, the Zettelkasten diplomat. After watching some of his workflows and config walkthroughs I thought, “How hard could it be?” Narrator: It was very hard. Once the dust settled from another glorious pacstrap and I stopped yelling at grub, (Mischa recommends systemd-boot and rightfully so, I changed to it on my next iteration. Anyhow, I was left with a mess of personalized configs (not to mention Hyprland configs) scattered all over ~/.config, .bashrc, .zshrc, .nvim, and half a dozen symlink experiments gone rogue. And that’s when I met her…stow. A tool so simple, yet so elegant, I wanted to slap my past self for not using it sooner. What the heck is stow? GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager. It’s designed to help you manage your dotfiles by creating symlinks from a central repo to your home directory (or wherever you need them). No more script spaghetti or juggling lns like a clown at a shell prompt. How it works (in plain English) Imagine this: You’ve got a repo of dotfiles: dotfiles/ ├── bash/ │ └── .bashrc ├── nvim/ │ └── .config/nvim/init.lua ├── zsh/ │ └── .zshrc stow bash zsh nvim And like magic, stow symlinks everything right into place. Boom. Configs deployed. No fuss. No mess. Just pure, delicious symlink wizardry. Why it changed my life (ok maybe just my install sanity) 🚀 Easy to update configs: Edit your dotfiles repo, run stow again. Done. 🔁 Reproducible setups: Setting up a new machine becomes a one-liner.

This post is for everyone who's still on levels 1 to 3. Go on, say hello :-) Anyone who's level 4 or higher is only allowed to use the reply function. Let's see if this works here -Mischa

I'm currently researching how to setup a homelab and potential hardware purchases. One thing that I'm wondering is how kubernetes nodes are run in the real world, on physical hardware or virtual machines? I'm trying to figure out if I should first learn to use proxmox to create VMs / LXC containers and then use those containers to install Kubernetes nodes and will this be applicable in the real world.

RAM and SSD prices have skyrocket in late 2025 and will probably continue this trend in 2026 and maybe even beyond. I would like to build a homelab for learning Kubernetes and hosting a few small services (such as PiHole, etc.). Ideally, the homelab is pretty quiet / can run in a low power state as to not contribute significantly to my energy bill. What are some good hardware recommendations (ideally "budget"). Also, do you need multiple devices to run Kubernetes, if so, how many (2, 3, 5, ...)? NOTE: I'm not sure if learning Kubernetes means that I first have to build a homelab, or can I install Kubernetes on my local desktop machine locally to start learning?

If you had to learn Linux again, how would you do it?