Fedora

The hardware I built this on an HP T620 … a thin client, not a real server. Dual-core AMD GX-217GA SoC, the kind of chip that used to sit in front of a cash register or a hospital terminal, not something anyone would call fast. No AES-NI either, which matters more than you’d think once you’re running encrypted traffic through it all day. If you’ve got something like this sitting in a drawer, it’s genuinely enough to run a small personal NAS. Don’t expect it to be quick. Expect it to just work, reliably, once it’s set up right. ...

Why negativo17 over RPM Fusion RPM Fusion’s NVIDIA packages work, but negativo17’s repo tends to track driver releases faster and packages them with fewer of the DKMS-related headaches that show up after a kernel update. For a desktop where I don’t want to babysit whether the driver rebuilt correctly after every dnf upgrade, that reliability matters more than which repo is more “official.” Adding the repos Two separate repos … one for the driver itself, one for the multimedia codec stack that pairs with it: ...

Why this even matters Every block device on Linux has an I/O scheduler sitting between your applications and the actual disk, deciding the order requests get sent in. Get the wrong one for your workload and you’re leaving real performance on the table, or worse, adding latency you didn’t need to. Check what’s currently active and what else is available: cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler The one in brackets is active. On modern kernels you’ll usually see some combination of none, mq-deadline, kyber, and bfq listed. ...

Two boxes, two philosophies I run Fedora Server on my T620 NAS and NixOS with KDE Plasma on my daily driver desktop. Not a lab experiment, not “let me try this for a week and write a hot take” … these are both machines I actually depend on every day, which means whatever broke, I had to actually fix, not just note down and move on. Fedora: familiar, fast to fix, one config file at a time Fedora Server feels like driving a car you already know how to drive. Something breaks, you find the config file, you edit it, you restart the service. dnf, systemctl, /etc/. No new mental model required. ...