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Housekeeping 2026

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Once a year, I go through some chores. This time, I'm looking at Omarchy and reviewing my self-hosting infrastructure.

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I've decided to follow DHH's playbook, so I bought a Beelink SER5. I have been working on an Asus TUF laptop for ~5 years, and before that I also worked mostly on a laptop. It's been almost 8 years since I've had a desktop PC 😱. But it isn't as bad as it sounds, because I do have a screen and a mouse/keyboard, so most of the time I'm using the laptop as a desktop PC 😅. Still, it is very annoying to constantly plug it in and out, and moving the laptop around. So I'm excited for this :). Regarding specs, it "only" has 24GB RAM and it's not the best of the bunch. But honestly, it's been years since I've cared about these things. I'm currently running on 16GB RAM, and honestly I don't have any performance issues. It's funny, because I love computers and software; but I couldn't care less about RAMs, CPUS, or any of the specs. I guess I'm mostly a software guy :).

I'm also going to give Omarchy a try. I have been using Ubuntu for ~15 years, and I haven't touched windows since. I also have never owned an Apple device, so changing my OS could be very impactful. But the truth is that I don't have anything fancy, and the reason I haven't tried any other distributions yet is because Ubuntu has been "good enough". However, I've always been curious, and I've been tempted more than once to try Debian or Arch. What really excites me about Omarchy, besides the fact that I like DHH's taste, is that it seems to be super configurable. So I'm looking forward to not switching again for the next 15 years. We'll see how it pans out!

Other than that, I'll also use this task to go over some of my self-hosting setup. I've already talked about this in many of my other tasks, but TLDR here's everything I am self-hosting at the moment:

And the tools I'm using to orchestrate and manage all of this are kanjuro (docker), rireki (backups), and nginx-agora.

Well, and that's it for this year's housekeeping! As always, I don't particularly look forward to doing these, but I'm always glad I did them :).

First of all, I upgraded my self-hosted Nextcloud instance. This is often the one I dread upgrading the most, because it is somewhat the most sensitive... and yet, this year was the easiest :). It was so easy, in fact, that I spent some more time tinkering with Nextcloud, and I realized that I had made a grave mistake 😱. Turns out that my server was configured in the Helsinki region, whilst my Storage Box was in the Nuremberg region... And wouldn't you know it, moving them both to Helsinki has made my Nextcloud A LOT faster. To the point that browsing the folders in the web is almost as fast as browsing them in my computer :D. I thought Nextcloud was slow, but turns out it was my fault 🙈. Something interesting to mention is that I couldn't actually move the Storage Box from one region to another, but it was easy to just get a new one and rsync the entire volume. Yes, all 352GB of it. And everything worked out without a glitch, amazing. I also changed from a WebDAV mount to SMB/CIFS, which is apparently faster. But I'm sure most of the gains come from the shorter physical distance that the bytes have to travel.

The second thing I did was upgrade Statamic to v6, but this one didn't turn out so well 😅. In fact, my website has been half broken for almost a week :/ (let me know if something's still broken!). I documented my issues in a github discussions thread, and with some help from the Discord community I've been able to remediate most problems. Still, I'm not super happy with the way things turned out... My first impressions with Statamic were great, but I didn't like this experience a bit. I just upgraded the site for "security", I certainly didn't want any new features or improvements. But I found myself with a broken site and struggling to make sense of it. The funny thing is that my site is super simple, it's just a bunch of markdown files and some PHP/JS sprinkles. Maybe at some point I'll have to rethink the architecture. For now, though, it seems like things are back on track. Also, I want to give a shout out to Laravel Nightwatch, because it's been awesome for detecting and solving these issues. I don't know how anyone can have websites without something like this!

Finally, I've been using Omarchy as my main desktop environment for a couple of weeks, and... it's awesome! It is opinionated, which is good for some things and bad for others. For example, it seems like DHH doesn't ever have more than one user per computer, because as soon as you try to create a second account everything breaks 😅. But I was able to make it work after some tinkering. Other than that, though, it's pretty cool. I can't say that I loved anything in particular (I'm not super entranced with Hyprland, though it's nice), but I really love the customization and ownership. I feel like I could change anything, and that's awesome. It reminds me a lot of the experience I had with VSCode, but now for the entire OS. So far, I haven't had any issues with drivers or the environment, fingers crossed 🤞 (I had to use distrobox for some playwright stuff though). If you're curious about some of my configurations, check out my env repository. I'm sure it's going to change a lot in the following months/years.

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