Skip to content

2025

A minimal graphical session with River, PipeWire and OpenRC

Graphical sessions are often full of unnecessary features, increasing (unnecessarily) the overall complexity of a desktop system. In this blog entry we intend to go back to the bare minimum, which defines itself as a reasonable step forward in practicality compared the default tty. Like being able to run graphical applications in windows and being able to manage these windows efficiently. We will meet but not exceed these requirements with River as our tiling window manager, PipeWire as our multimedia framework, and OpenRC as our user-service manager.

Maintaining a system build on ZFS

ZFS opens up novel methods to safely maintain a system. In this blog entry we will outline these methods in the form of an update protocol. To keep your system healthy this protocol should be executed on a weekly/monthly basis.

A hardened Gentoo-Linux/openrc base installation

This blog entry will demonstrate how to install a hardened x86_64 Gentoo Linux musl/openrc/UEFI signed UKI operating system on an encrypted ZFS pool with automatic decryption using TPM. This entry is based on the Gentoo x86_64 handbook and the Gentoo wiki. Gentoo supplies the right tools to build a Linux operating system from scratch, suited to the hardware and needs of the user. This form of customizability and optimizability together with the strong community behind Gentoo makes it a good choice for a desktop operating system.