Feel free to post your current setup/battlestation/screenshots! I really enjoy these every year, and while deskto.ps is now a great place for screenshots, this really encapsulates everyone’s larger battlestations :)
Previous threads can be found at:
Feel free to post your current setup/battlestation/screenshots! I really enjoy these every year, and while deskto.ps is now a great place for screenshots, this really encapsulates everyone’s larger battlestations :)
Previous threads can be found at:
Desk and desktop
The MacBook’s wall plug is a little macintosh too right?
It is!
Oh, my…that’s hot.
How do you get that fancy iTerm2 going? :-O I’m soooo impressed.
It’s a normal iTerm setup with its theme set to Compact, and “Dim background windows” enabled. The borders and shadows are drawn by my spoonfish window manager that I’ve been working on lately to emulate my sdorfehs X11 window manager.
Desk and ‘server’.
that mural looks really cool!
Willing to share any backstory on the mural?
The lady serving drinks is Saint Sofia, the city’s patron (of Sofia, Bulgaria, where I live). Sofia means “wisdom” (or “learning”) in Greek – that’s also why there is an owl chillin’ - in Greek mythology an owl is a symbol of wisdom. It was made custom by a Bulgarian artist. I like the drawing, partly because it is in my field-of-view while programming (which is a creative exercise) and being surrounded by art is nice (but can also understand if this is a bit much for other people :P)
Beautiful, thank you.
I am very proud of my 1 TB RAM office workstation that runs NixOS, XMonad, Emacs, Firefox and XTerm. The setup is very simple and heavily inspired by http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html.
I am often outcompeting HPC clusters that have a lot more power but spend most of the time doing I/O. Plus, development time is tiny as don’t need to bother with all their insane package management, queuing, messaging and fragile storage.
Living in the future is great. I went to a talk by some IBM folks about hypervisors in 2005 where they were talking about a new machine that they’d built for a customer with 1 TiB of RAM. The RAM alone cost over $1M. Now it’s still not cheap, but it’s at least plausibly affordable (I’m guessing something around the $3K mark?).
It was a little bit more expensive as I bought it in 2019, but still very reasonable. Below $6k, I think.
I decided to ditch academic HPC clusters after many years of frustration and eye-watering membership fees. Usually you have to pay a flat fee to be able to submit compute jobs. Administration is non-existent, you are on your own installing packages in userspace. Even with Nix, this is not straightforward due to the lack of root. I have met poor souls that had spent a couple of weeks installing exotic dependencies by hand.
Plus individual nodes have slow I/O, as it’s non-local storage and tiny memory. Useless to run algorithms that require big data structures built from large datasets. My previous employer got the memory part but not the I/O part. They spent millions buying a couple of big SGI UV machines (with 16 TB of RAM each, in the early 2010s!) but still tied them to horribly slow networked drives. The result was an average uptime of 50 hours (!) and a whole organization that imploded.
Desk - not much to say about the Windows machine (it’s mainly used for gaming, and when I need to use Visual Studio); but on the left is a ThinkPad T60 w/ Libreboot, running Debian stable, with jcs/sdorfehs as the window manager. Only got the T60 a few days ago, so I’m still setting everything up on it (and getting the parts to upgrade it some more), but here’s a screenshot regardless.
Any idea where you got the desk? I’ve been looking for a nice L-shaped desk with a keyboard hutch for ages, and yours looks quite sleek!
I got the desk from a friend (the company he worked for was moving offices and giving away the old furniture), so I’m not sure where it would have come from, sorry!
What timing! My Desk/Homelab/‘Workshop’, which is far cleaner than it has any right to be because, purely by coincidence, I spent several hours cleaning it yesterday. Not pictured, the banker’s box full of crap that needed to not be on my desk, but didn’t otherwise have a home…
Desktop is just Gnome with a default Gnome and/or Fedora wallpaper.
Setup is 1st gen Framework Laptop w/ 2 4K monitors via a CalDigit TB3+ dock. (Some part of this setup is unreliable though, not a recommendation.) The keyboards are, (front) a first round ErgoDox Wireless from SliceMK with solar, (back left) backup main wireless keyboard for when I need to type things without the mental overhead of a learning a new layout, (back right) wired CODE Keyboard hooked up to my gaming computer in the rack that is almost entirely unused except for choosing which OS to boot since the EDW is Bluetooth’d to that computer.
The printer is a still entirely stock Prusa MK3S in an incomplete DIY lack enclosure. It’s absolutely a workhorse despite the level I neglect I provide for it.
The rack contains 4 servers. First is the aforementioned gaming computer, a Ryzen 5900X + Radeon 6900XT that I was lucky enough to get ahold of for list price in December 2019 and only had to sit outside in Minnesota for 3-5 hours before dawn each day for a week.
The one below that is my workhorse that hosts all my self-hosted services like Matrix chat for my wife an I, RSS reader, notes stuff, and what not.
The next one is a pile of parts that, until a couple months ago, when I got a new CPU on a BF sale, I could never get to be stable. It’s mostly for messing around with.
The last one is my NAS. It also has a Ryzen processor and has 64 GB of ECC RAM. It hosts just an NFS server, lol. This was built with the ambition for it to be my end game, so it’s intentionally super OP. I really need to get more moved over to that one. Right now my plan is that one will host all my internal services and server #2 will get moved to a DMZ network and only host things that I want to be publicly available.
Not visible, just sitting on top of the stack is the old NAS, an ODROID HC2, that’s doing way more on an old Samsung phone CPU. But that one is hanging out on an old unsupported debian because armbian dropped support, so I want to get everything moved off of it.
I’m a big fan of the Lack stack!
Messy desk and desktop is just default KDE - my main interests lie in terminal emulator anyway. The only mildly interesting thing is an e-ink monitor and monochrome setup for it.
Thanks for the write-up of the monitor! I am still on the fence whether to spend to money to try it, so reading about experiences of others is helpful.
That e-ink monitor looks really cool!
I always wonder how people can work with a desk that is not height-adjustable? You tune your chair following ergonomic guidelines and then the table/keyboard is too high/low to preserve a good 90 degree angle and then what?
(Admittedly, I have worked with a non-adjustable desk and even chair when I was younger, and I have come to regret it.)
I adjust the chair and my elbows lie on its armrests, yeah. I’m of generic height so it somehow worked to me still with generic desks, though I’m tempted to get an adjustable one every now and then.
What keyboard is that in the e-ink monitor image? I’ve been looking for a low profile (choc or similar) split keyboard for a while, and haven’t run across anything that I wouldn’t have had to self-assemble (not really interested in doing that).
Mistel Barocco MD650L - old model full of mini- and microusb connectors :) I think they’ve got a newer ones with usb-c by now.
I’m also using an e-ink monitor. For those of you interested, it can be seen in action. The videos are boring, but in part 3 you can see how the display works.
desk
I’m currently alternating between a normal chair and a kneeling chair. I’ve been having a lot of lower back pain lately, and the kneeling chair really helps with that, but it makes my knees and tail bone hurt. Right now I just switch between standing, kneeling and sitting. I write emails standing, and code sitting and kneeling. I was never able to focus on code standing for some reason but I tend to pace when I write emails, so standing for emails works well.
The orange cloth is used to cover my LCD monitor. Sometimes I need color, speed, or just a second monitor. Unfortunately, it takes like 6 seconds for my monitor to turn on. When I need to switch between screens I keep the glowy one covered.
Upvote for steamdeck.
Linux tower and a Mac mini on a store bought computer desk. Much more interesting is the DYI cable management system I added a decade ago, for around $15.
That’s the way to do it in Boston! Nice!
That cable management system is genius.
Desk and desktop
I see you’re into Coffee? I see the Wacaco sticker.
https://www.home-barista.com/ is the lobste.rs for Coffee.
PS: You might already know about it, but others here might not :-)
Yes I love coffee and everything about home made espresso.
Wow thanks for sharing I did not know!
I didn’t, and it’s way off-topic for here, but maybe someone in this thread knows:
I have been looking for bean-to-cup filter machine that has a burr grinder and drips into an insulated (not heated) jug. So far, I have found precisely one such machine to exist, it doesn’t ship outside the USA, and reviews indicate it often breaks after 6 months. Has anyone heard of such a thing being mass produced? Or a kickstarter or similar for one.
What type of keyboard is it?
Looks like NuPhy.
Yep! Great keyboard!
Looks nice indeed! I’m going to pick one up and give it a try.
How do you get the windows to organize that way, with the margin between them? Is that a Rectangle config I’m unaware of?
Yep, that’s correct. You can do it thru UI or you can set it thru JSON. Here are my settings -> https://git.0x7f.dev/andreicek/dotfiles/src/branch/master/rectangle/RectangleConfig.json
Thanks! This changes everything for me. :D
Same! I’ve been wanting to do this lately. I didn’t know you could do it with Rectangle itself and thought I’d have to do it with Hammerspoon.
The very messy computer. The laptop is old and crappy; I keep meaning to purpose it for something, but have yet to. The ‘desktop’ (?) is pretty nice, but due for a cpu upgrade—I could do with 4x more cores. There are some very good reasons to put it in a box, like:
somewhere to rest my feet
electrical grounding and physical protection
hard drives will be happier if stabilised
But I haven’t put it in a box yet. (That said, I am gratified to see that dsc has the same setup :)
Desk, slightly less messy this time (ignore the stray MCUs, pens, cables, cat wallet, baseball…). Betrays my hatred of LEDs: the DAC normally has an always-on LED, but I opened it up and shorted it. (Hopefully it doesn’t affect the sound!) And the mouse is dead silent, of course (I keep meaning to get a trackball, but still haven’t gotten around to it; this seems to be as ergonomic as it gets for a traditional mouse).
This laptop is much less old-and-crappy, and so sees some use; when you see numbers as sexy as these, it’s hard to resist. Oh, and the mug contained jasmine tea.
EDIT: bonus: coats, cables, kangaroo, and books. 3rd from top is knuth vol 3, so it’s relevant!
This is my WFH Desk. I use it for writing, coding, streaming and gaming!
I’ve been real happy to see almost everyone using a Gecko-based browser on Lobsters
I’m curious, if you don’t mind sharing, what is the significance of the framed newsprint pages?
They are the frontpages of a national newspaper on the days my wife and I were born.
Oh neato! That’s a cool idea! Did your parents happen to save those, or did you go back and find them? Or just reprinted digital scans?
No, the newspaper sells them. Or, at least, they used to: https://www.irishtimes.com/pagesales/.
Desk and desktop
My desk (running Windows at the time, and with terrible cable management because I moved recently) and the i3-gaps/polybar desktop Fedora setup I use, taken from my older laptop.
Desktop computer: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2022-01-15-high-end-linux-pc/
Desk setup: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-05-23-desk-setup/ with a few changes — I should probably write an updated version :)
My primary “workstation” literally right now as I’m sitting here, having switched to my personal machine from my work-issued M1 MacBook Pro. As you can see it’s very much in a post-Christmas / guests / children state :)
It’s a ThinkPad X250 running FreeBSD 13.1, on a docking station, with an IBM SK-8840 keyboard, Elecom three-button mouse (not pictured), StumpWM window manager. Monitor is some random 1080p AOC thing on an arm. Probably the most noteworthy thing is the Beastie Scream artwork sticker[1].
The desk itself is a manually height-adjustable bench type desk thrown out by one of my previous employers, with a replacement top (going from MDF to proper oiled timber).
[1] Disclosure: I work for the company who sells those :)
Love the old Thinkpad keyboard, first time I’ve seen this model.
They’re getting difficult to find. Mine is hooked up to the docking station via a PS-2 to USB adaptor. Interestingly I discovered a failure mode in cheap types of that adaptor that have the mouse reporting as a barcode reader. The second least cheap adaptor on Amazon works fine though :)
My poorly-lit desk (I took the photo at 8 in the morning before going to work). My setup’s changed a bit since last year. The desk is definitely new and it’s one of those telescopic Ikea desks that lets you switch between sitting and standing, it’s definitely helped me with posture and desk space. I’m still using both the trackballs I bought last year, I only switch to a regular mouse for videogames. I also have an old cabinet that I more or less soundproofed where I keep my raspberry pi and HDDs that I use as maskeshift NAS, didn’t think about taking a photo of that though.
My workstation runs Windows mostly because of videogames and my work laptop (the Dell) runs stock Fedora Workstation to stop me from wasting time ricing it so they’re pretty boring and not worth posting. My Thinkpad X220 sadly doesn’t see much use these days but I still like to customize it for fun every now and then, here’s a somewhat recent screenshot.
I’m very proud of my workstation, mostly because I built it myself. It is a Metalfish G5 case (small form factor, this thing is really tiny) with a water-cooled Ryzen 5950X and a 2080 Ti. I also really enjoy the Keychron keyboards (I have three of them at this point). It does appear that my cable management game is weak. Awesome to see all the other posts here 😊
That’s a very fine case, and makes me feel rather nostalgic.
If you don’t mind me making a personal observation, it seems like you’re a little dehydrated…
That is hilarious 😂
Desk/mess
This is probably not the right forum for this question but you are the first post who has listed a work laptop running Windows (which I am also forced to use). What device do you use for switch keyboard video and mouse between these three systems?
For keyboard and mouse I just use the hub (under the main screen) and connect it to the machine I am about to use, but when it comes to screens I have no proper solution in place. Using my desktop machine I use daisy chained display port, but the Dell DA310 dongle does not support that for some reason so for that shit to work properly I have a separate HDMI-cable to the second monitor.
I guess one way could be to use mDP and plain DP and switch by the monitor(s), but enough cables for such setup.
TLDR; Manual switch and cable routing :-)
My desk isn’t worth mentioning but I’m inappropriately proud of my desktop.
I’m impressed by all the environmental data you’ve got on your desktop (humidity, pressure, visibility, etc.). Are you just pulling that from your local weather station? If so, what API do you use?
All the weather credit goes to Igor Chubin for developing wttr.in. If you’ve never encountered it before, running
will give your the local weather, beautifully formatter in your terminal. To get everything in convenient JSON format, it’s just
That is the most comprehensive (free) weather information collection that I’ve encountered. Add bonus that it also does the geolocation for me and gets an approximate latitude and longitude. Close enough to be useful, wrong enough that I can post the screenshot without doxxing myself.
Desktop and Desk
Desk is an IKEA Bekant, so sit/stand. Has an aftermarket control board fitted so it can remember positions. It’s usually a mess, although this is worse than it has been recently.
Main machine is a 14” MacBook Pro, the tower is a Dell Optiplex 3020 I picked up recently as a gaming PC, but I’ve not yet put it in the games room. Screen is a Huawei MateView which isn’t a widescreen. Lego on top is a custom-built phone holder (to use phone as webcam via macOS Continuity Camera.)
The two servers are Gen 8 HP Microservers, one running SmartOS, the other NixOS. Both have ZFS pools in. The random white box & Raspberry Pi on top of the servers are my doorbell receiver, Pi listens for GPIO pin changing state and emits MQTT message.
Desk, main workstation in the shelf to the right, a tower box containing what looks suspiciously like a laptop motherboard, a Ryzen 5 and some 2×16 GB RAM sticks I had intended for a different machine.
Wall looked way too empty while it was in the shot so hid it with some picture I took before the snow came. Not like I notice while staring into the 34” screen.
Plant has been watered and is looking happier now. :)
What’s the tiny laptop(?) :)
Cheap Acer for travel, running Debian 11 and Gnome.
Desk / Desktop
I use a KVM switch to go between those 4 computers there. Keyboard is Kinesis Advantage 360. Apple Magic Trackpad for pointer input. reMarkable 2 for that little e-ink tablet on the side there.
Doom emacs editor, kitty terminal, on Regolith (i3 embeded within Gnome) window manager.
Uplift sit-to-stand desk. Herman Miller Embody chair.
Oh and hidden in the back in the soft guitar bag is a Jamstik Midi Guitar. It’s absolutely amazing!
How do you like your reMarkable tablet? I’ve long been considering getting some form of a digital tablet for notetaking, but I could never justify the high price of iPads (and the lower priced tablets always had too high of a latency). Does the software for interfacing with the tablet work well on Linux?
I really love the reMarkable 2! It’s super hackable, lots of fun extensions and such. It is just a linux machine. You can ssh into it. Though, to be honest, I basically just use its base software, which is great and works well. I’ve gotten screensharing via their desktop app to work on a mac. I’ve never tried it on linux, but I’d bet it works fine. The mobile app is quite nice too. I use the dropbox integration to sync documents, which is super easy and works well on linux.
The writing experience on the reMarkable is absolutely top-notch and hasn’t really been beaten in terms of latency, palm-detection, easy erasing, etc. That’s what I really love it for.
My poggers setup
Everything is dracula themed and using i3, i3blocks etc
Beer included 🍺️🍺️
It’s a WIP since I’m spread across my guest bed and I just got in and calibrated the monitor but here is my current setup. Normally it’s a floor desk anyhow–so maybe I’ll just keep it like this.
Is you GPU okay? ;)
Not really, but it does work for coding use cases. I’d like to try an eGPU sooner rather than later, but these things come in steps.
Heh, I meant the glitchy wallpaper that is going on.
Ha. Sorry I missed it. It’s good to feel less peer pressure for a GPU though since the prices never lowered here after the pandemic price surge.
Working from home, desk, desktop.
Desktop, work laptop dock, server, switch, printer, phone, all behind the UPS.
Debian, i3, vim, zsh, Inconsolata.
Function over form, featuring “temporary” cable management and a stack of paper I have yet to sort dating back to 2018.
Still working on this. Started right after the holidays.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/garl6am1m7mg0vc/2023-01-17%2009.38.25.jpg?dl=0
nice. Nord Stage?
Yup. Makes for a nice break from coding when I get particularly stuck on something.
I had a two-level keyboard setup with an electric piano and a separate computer for sequencing, but it turned out to be too much overhead for what I use music for. The keyboard and an analog mixer are just fine.
Ahhh nice, yup that should indeed be sufficient! I’ve got a two-level keyboard stand as well, but yeah, currently just laying folded up against the wall. Hmmm, a synth/keyboard next to the workstation seems like an excellent idea… :D
Desk looks like this only messier (that’s from 2020; since then I’ve replaced the monitor (with an LG 27” 16:9), the speakers (with some little Edifier bookshelves on the shelves), and the HF-AUTO (with a Tuner Genius XL)).
PC is a Ryzen 9 3900X, 80GB RAM, around 20TB of SSD (ZFS, except the Windows drive, and all SATA 2.5” except the Linux boot drive which is NVMe), an RTX 3080, and an IBM/Lexmark keyboard from 1994 with a TrackPoint IV. Runs Ubuntu with KDE (and I’ve got KWin configured to act almost tiling-ish), and a very occasional boot into Win11. Not quite the latest and greatest of anything, but more than sufficient to do the job.
Ham stack is a Flex 6600M, SPE 1.3K-FA amplifier, TGXL, DEMI transverters for 2m and 70cm, Green Heron rotator controller, and a LeoNTP as 10MHz reference. Outdoors is a 160m loop @30’, a KIO Hexbeam @30’ (on top of a Rohn 9H50, spun by a Yaesu G-800 at the base), a Diamond X200 @25’, and a LZ1AQ loop for receive.
I’ve also got a server for my ionospheric modeling site, which I’m very happy is not in my house, and also very happy that I got someone else to pay for. That’s an Asus 1U server with dual EPYC Milan 7413 (total 48 cores / 96 threads), 256GB RAM, 4TB SSD, dual 1200W PSU, dual 10GbE, and a decent BMC. Runs Debian plus a whole lotta podman. Tech stack is about 10 different components/services in a combination of Python, Perl, and Fortran (no, I’m not serving HTTP from Fortran, those bits talk stdin/stdout and they’re fronted by Python).
Turns out the big issue with finding a home for a machine like that is power density. Sure, there are lots of places that sell colo 1 or 2 U at a time, but they’re kind of like budget airlines — no legroom. They want you to be using 100W per U, maybe 150 if you’re lucky. If you tell them you’ve got a 1U machine that hits 450 or 500W every 15 minutes, and idles at 200W, they’ll quote you a price that’s about 4x the usual 1U rate, if they talk to you at all. Because… well, if you stacked 40 machines like that on top of each other it would be quite the space heater.
Ooh Flex, nice. I’ve just got a Kenwood TS-480SAT and Yaesu FT-857D myself. They get the job done though! haha :)
TS-480SAT is a nice machine. A few years ago I was on a quest to make everything remotable, because I was living with my girlfriend in a city apartment, so I upgraded a lot of stuff. These days I’m back in the house, but the Flex is still nice :)
Yeah, I love the TS-480SAT! Super “accessible” and quick to use, and of course the built-in tuner is a huge plus. Seems to be a very well-designed and engineered rig.
hahah, yeah now you get the best of both worlds - not having to use your radio remote (but having the option), AND having such a super-awesome radio to use! awwww yeah :D
My messy desk.
And my desktop. With obligatory neofetch and all that. I use KDE plasma with my modified theme. The colorscheme I use is all mine though, here’s repo with all my stuff: https://codeberg.org/akselmo/aks_themes/. The beige slab is my Devterm A04 which I use to compile stuff for ARM.
I am a weirdo that even games on Linux, I have no Windows installed anymore. :P
My Thinkpad is not in the photo, I don’t really use it around my desk anyhow.
desk with 12000 lm of daylight, ErgodoxEZ keyboard, Herman Miller chair.
desktop with Debian, stumpwm, Firefox, st terminal (forked), Emacs.
nice, Mirra ftw. I got two (one each for my wife and I)! way prefer it over the Aeron due to the more-supportive back.
Our WFH desk, very minimalistic to make it easy to switch between sitting/standing. My wife and I can easily switch by exchanging MacBooks and keyboards/pointing devices (she uses a Magic Keyboard, I use a Kinesis Advantage360 Pro). At the office-office (not there today, so no pic), I use a 4k LG screen (hopefully to be replaced some day), Thunderbolt dock, Kinesis Advantage2 and a regular Ikea desk (hope to replace it by a standing desk at some point as well).
I also use a headless Linux GPU machine, but it is stashed away in a closet along with other stuff (home NAS, etc.).
Yes, fellow Kinesis Advantage 360 user! https://lobste.rs/s/wkeaed/lobsters_battlestations_screenshots#c_bsllva
It’s the best keyboard :)
That book deserves a better purpose :-)
My desk
Oh my. Desk is a bombsite and not photogenic.
Setup is (currently) an old Dell Latitude E7270 in a docking station, connected to a 27” landscape display and a 24” portrait display. All 3 monitors are active, managed by Ubuntu Unity.
Input via a 1991 IBM Model M, which plugs directly into my docking station without an adaptor, and random wheelmouse.
Main working tools are Waterfox, Thunderbird, Franz, and Panwriter.
(http://www.pahem.de/usesthis.html)
My Desk is a complete mess at the moment (normally ;~P). My Desktop is awesome window manager running OpenBSD on a 2012 Toshiba Portege Laptop with 16Gb RAM, definitely due an upgrade but I’m planning on getting M2 Apple Macbook / Airbook and dual boot into OpenBSD…
My work desk is tidier than my home setup, but it needs more OpenBSD…
Desktop and ‘server’
My briefly tidy desk has some messy wiring to support a wired VR headset.
From time to time, it doubles as a walking desk thanks to a low-speed treadmill.
Desktop background is the weather forecast (for four days) & current pollen levels (Melbourne, AU is basically the hayfever capital of the world).
Driving it is a machine that was pretty damn fast when it was new 5 years ago - threadripper & a 2060 RTX. I picked the threadripper for the high core count, which sped up the test suite at work from 55 minutes (on my previous machine, an intel macbook pro) to 9 minutes.
desk working at home. Emacs user, which you can’t see.
https://skylab.org/~ryanm/screenshot/battlestation_2022.png
Paste this in your JavaScript console if you wanna quickly see all the images! (except the ones that go to HTML pages :P)
Here’s my most recent desktop post on the fediverse: https://merveilles.town/@sam/109433245218037757
Desk and desktop
I love keyboard-driven software, so I mostly live in the terminal. My tmux sessions have way more activity than my i3 workspaces.
Desk. I use the iPad with the Planck as a mobile workstation.