My Setup

Hardware

I work remotely for GitLab, from the comfort of my home. So, I don’t have separate setups at my home and my “office”. :)

My work laptop is a Dell XPS 15 9530. I have been a fan of Lenovo Thinkpads for almost a decade now, and used different models. Currently, I use an L14 as my personal machine.

I used to have a Lenovo Thinkpad x260 as my work machine, which I replaced as it started showing its age. That machine now serves as my homelab server, where I run various services.

I have a Raspberry Pi 5 Model B, on which I mainly run a PiHole.

I am a self-proclaimed Bibliophile. Even though I prefer reading dead-tree books more, I own a Kindle Paperwhite 7th edition.

Software

I use only GNU/Linux in my computers. I used to hop distros while I was in college and have used Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Fedora, and Manjaro Linux at some point in the past. Currently, all my machines run Debian GNU/Linux.

In my work machine, I use hyprland as my window manager, and in my personal machine I use i3 (only because I am lazy and haven’t migrated to hyprland yet). I am currently using Zsh as my terminal shell with Pure promt (tried oh-my-zsh, loved it, later realized I am not using 90% of it and that most of it is essentially bloat, and then got rid of it). I use NeoVim as my main editor (don’t konw how to operate Emacs and have no plan to learn how to), and occasionally use gedit when my typing involves Malayalam.

Firefox is my main browser - both my mobile and computer. I have Google Chrome also installed on my laptop to test if stuff is broken only in Firefox (it happens more often than you think). Thunderbird handles my mail, Hexchat for IRC and Rambox for almost everything else (GMail, Slack, Whatsapp, Calendar, etc.). I also use Telegram Desktop and Element Desktop (for Matrix) for instant messaging.

My homelab runs various services, the main ones that I frequently use being:

1. Deluge, for torrent downloads
2. Jellyfin as media server
3. Navidrome, for music
4. Calibre-Web for ebooks

I use Tailscale for remote access to my machines, and I use Mullvad as my VPN.