Homelab update v20251030

Thelio Major is now running bazzite:nvidia. Just regular Bazzite; no custom modifications or builds. I don’t intend to use it as a regular workstation, so no personalized software is installed. Just Steam, Lutris, MangoJuice, and a few flatpaks. I’m using the Firefox flatpak with sync enabled for minimally viable browsing. So it’s basically like a glorified gaming console. I’m using the GSYNC monitor for this machine. It is configured to go to sleep after 60 minutes of idleness.

Meerkat (meer9) is now my main workstation, with CachyOS KDE Plasma. I’ve also decided to run homelab monitoring stuff like Ntfy, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Promtail with syslog-ng forwarding on it. I don’t quite see a sufficient reason to keep this monitoring stack separate from my workstation. I do everything there anyway, so the services might as well run on localhost. I can still connect to the Grafana dashboard over Tailscale from my laptop.

I played Prey for a couple hours on Bazzite, and somehow the performance of the game felt more efficient than it did on CachyOS. I don’t know why, but it’s alright by me.

On Bazzite, I also have my Nextcloud via Murena Workspace account accessible on it with the Nextcloud desktop client flatpak. Most of my Steam games store saved games in the Steam Cloud, but GOG stores everything under ~/Gaming/gog/. Lutris allows using the native system paths for some games. Like Dishonored stores saved games and settings under ~\Documents\My Games on Windows. The Linux XDG equivalent would be ~/Documents, which for me is a symbolic link to ~/Nextcloud/Documents, so that stuff is synced with Nextcloud. In contrast, Prey stores saved games under ~/Games/gog/prey/drive_c/Users/jas/Saved Games/Arkane Studios/.... For now I just rsynced the saved games there, but I have to figure out an efficient way to sync that directory on Nextcloud. Maybe if I keep the actual files under ~/Nextcloud/Documents/Saved Games and create a symlink to that directory from ~/Games/gog/prey/drive_c/Users/jas/Saved Games. Now that I think of it, I recall there being a program on GitHub called GameImage that might provide a more efficient way to keep gaming stuff synced on Linux. I can’t just sync ~/Games on Nextcloud because Lutris downloads and stores the entire game files there, roughly more than 100 GB of data with the games I currently have installed. Not something I want to sync over Nextcloud lol.

Anyway I’m pretty satisfied with this setup.

In other news, my NAS has to remain shut down until we figure out what is wrong with our house’s electrical wiring. My NAS is the most consistently power-hungry machine in my homelab, so it will be good to keep it off until we fix whatever needs fixing. My parents’ electrician friend is coming this weekend to see what’s wrong. Last week a circuit breaker shorted out, which powers stuff in our garage and outside the house. The wiring in our house is pretty old, and probably wasn’t setup to handle digital age power demands. I’d like for my parents to consider getting solar panels, but that’s too liberal-coded for them and they hastily dismiss the idea without a second thought. We don’t need no goddamn hippie solar panels.

My bedroom is pretty quiet now.