2025-06-30 - Killing the joy of homelabbing with my own expectation
Yesterday I realized something: I've built myself into a prison and didn't realize it.
Let me explain:
Working on tech projects has always been something relaxing for me. If I was stressed about something, I could always turn to my homelab as a source of calm and it would usually provide exactly the balance that I needed to keep going.
But recently I found this not to be the case anymore. I would turn to a project and just stare at the screen. I was thinking of all of the things I would need to do to set something new up and I felt overwhelmed.
I was overwhelmed by all of the things that I convinced myself to be necessary.
- Everything needs to be declarative
- Machines as cattle, not pets
- Immutable systems and containers
- GitOps all the things
- Automated deployment
- CI/CD pipeline
- Security considerations
This lead me to my current setup, where it feels impossible to just do something.
Want to try out a new program? Better first figure out how to run it in a container and make it run on Kubernetes. And manifests need to be committed to Git.
Quickly spinning up a simple file share to give a friend a download link? Impossible. I don't have a single machine where I could just touch an nginx config and point it at a folder.
Install something on the home server? Change the Nix config. Oh, I didn't update it in a while, let's also do that. Aaaand the rebuild is broken or there is yet another bug in nixpkgs that only shows itself after a few days.
Now today I realized that this goes even further: I use Fedora Silverblue on my laptop. That's an immutable distro and what has it caused? I can't just install a program anymore. I need to figure out whether it is available as a Flatpak, run it in distrobox (which I hate) or layer it and reboot.
None of these things are inherently bad. All of these practices have their place. Many make working on something with multiple people way easier. But I am just myself and just documenting what I did in markdown files works incredibly well for me.
Spelling it out now, it feels like I should have realized way earlier what was killing my joy. But now I did, so I'll be undoing a lot of this mess.
So here are a rough set of rules I have decided on for myself, so I hopefully don't fall into the same trap again:
- Stay away from immutable distros
- Only use deployment tools if they make things easier (Like setting up multiple machines at once)
- And only use them for the parts that they actually make easier. I don't need purity here.
- Ditch CI/CD pipelines (I want to go back to the simplicity of a shell script in a cronjob)
- Stuff gets installed in the easiest way possible, preferable a container on a single host with Containerfiles neatly organized in a directory, otherwise throw it into a VM
- Not everything needs to be fully declarative. Just doing a backup of state is fine!
- Purity is a sin. Accept compromise if it makes something work better for me.