From Windows To Linux to Self Hosting
I’ve always been a fan of Linux since I was maybe 11 years old, reading my mom’s college books about Linux and installing Fedora Core 4 on the PC her and my step-father built for me. Back then, it was just a curiosity, something I messed around with for a time until I got bored and booted back into Windows.
Many years later, around 2017 or so, I, like many people, started getting frustrated with the direction of Microsoft Windows and looking for an alternative. As a gamer, MacOS was simply out of the question since most of the games I enjoyed didn’t run on it. Linux had Wine, though, and I thought, surely it had progressed so much in the 10 or so years since I had used it that everything would just work now. Right?
Well, no, not really—not that I knew that yet. And I didn’t know how to set it up correctly anyway, even if it did. In fact, I didn’t really know how to use Linux at all. The whole reason I wanted to use Linux was control, but every distro I tried left me clueless beyond surface-level tasks like updating and installing packages or using whatever had a GUI.
Enter Arch Linux. I read a comment on Reddit praising its documentation, so I started looking into it. People said it was hard, but there was a guide to follow that would get you started. They said Arch would give you full control over everything because anything running was running because you told it to, and that the AUR was the bees’ knees. That sounded fun, so I spent the next five hours trying and failing to install Arch until, around 5 a.m., I was finally able to log into the Cinnamon desktop. Unfortunately, getting my games working wasn’t easy, so I went back to Windows when I wanted to play games. I intended to reboot back into Linux when I was done, though rarely did I ever do so in reality.
On and off, every couple of months I would check back in to see how things were progressing. Arch broke a couple of times, and I would reinstall it. Eventually, I learned how to fix it instead, until I stopped breaking it in the first place. Then Proton came out, and it made things much easier, though compatibility wasn’t quite there yet. I tried following guides from Level1Techs and SomeOrdinaryGamers, as well as online blogs, to get VFIO GPU passthrough working so I could just stay on Linux and have my games without relying on Wine. However, I could never get it working seamlessly the way I wanted, so I’d always end up back on Windows.
By late 2021, Valve had announced the Steam Deck—a Linux-powered handheld gaming PC—and Microsoft announced Windows 11 with its new hardware restrictions and controversial design choices. I was resolved to switch full-time to Linux. When I received my Steam Deck in February 2022 and was able to immediately play the entirety of Elden Ring on it, I stopped playing the only game I couldn’t play on Linux and removed my Windows drive from my main PC.
Once I switched full-time, my interest in open-source software only grew. If my operating system is open source, why shouldn’t I try to make everything it runs as open as I can? After all, it’s not like running Adobe is really an option. Eventually, I resolved to replace OneDrive. After some experimentation and failure, I settled on hosting my own Nextcloud instance. Initially, this was on an old computer I threw together, but my ISP didn’t offer so much as port forwarding, so access outside my home network was a challenge. I wanted to be able to access my cloud drive from all of my devices everywhere. While I did find a couple of ways to make it work, I thought it was more trouble than it was worth and rented a VPS.
While looking at how I would set up this new server, a friend of mine asked me to set up a Minecraft server, and I wanted to set up a Lemmy instance. After combing through forums and blog posts, help articles from server providers, and several Reddit threads on ways to get them all working at the same time on the same server, I settled on using Docker Compose and a reverse proxy. Somewhere along the way, I gave up on the Lemmy instance. For a while, I had a Palworld server container going. The list has grown and shrunk over time, and I have learned a lot running basically my own cloud. At one point, the whole thing stopped working entirely, and I had to reinstall the OS.
And now we get to today. There’s still a lot more I want to do with it, though I’m not entirely sure exactly what I can do. But learning was the point when I started. So I created this blog, hopefully to help others by sharing what I learn and have learned. I can’t really contribute back to the open-source community with code, so maybe sharing my experience can count for something. That, and serve as a reference for my forgetful self.