Nixos

The actual goal I wanted my QNAP and T620 shares to show up as normal folders in Dolphin on every machine I use, not something I connect to manually every session. Real mountpoints, mounted at boot, showing up as actual directories. Two different systems here, so two genuinely different setups … Fedora with a plain fstab, NixOS with a declarative config. Fedora side (JackSparrow2 itself) … the full block Step 1 … every mountpoint directory, created up front: ...

Why Tailscale, not a real VPN server I looked at running my own WireGuard setup by hand … port forwarding, managing keys myself, keeping track of which peer is which. Tailscale does all of that for you, on top of WireGuard, and the actual setup on each machine ends up being a handful of lines. Every device I own is on the same tailnet now: the T620 server, my NixOS desktop, and … the one that surprised me … a MacBook Air 6,2 from 2014 that has no business running anything modern smoothly, and does it fine anyway. ...

The problem this actually solves On a normal distro, if a network mount goes stale … the connection dropped, the server bounced, whatever … the fix is usually sudo umount then sudo mount -a, reading straight from /etc/fstab. Simple, because fstab is a plain text file you can just point tools at. NixOS doesn’t work that way. fileSystems entries in configuration.nix get compiled into individual systemd .mount units automatically at build time. There’s no /etc/fstab to edit or run mount -a against in the traditional sense … the mounts exist purely as generated systemd units with names like mnt-t620\x2drelationships.mount. ...

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. ...