22 Feb 2026
NVIDIA in 2026 how bad is it?
Spoiler it's not great.
We all know and love the Linus Torvalds Fuck you NVIDIA clip (2012) but how bad is it these days?
I decided to try it again with my latest Fedora 43 installation.
Before people ask why I even bought a NVIDIA card instead of AMD,
the long story short is I got it almost for free
and I didn't think much about it.
(It's a GeForce GTX 980)
Last time around I stuck with the nouveau driver which is the open source
implementation of a NVIDIA driver.
This works well enough for me to render a browser and some terminals.
I don't have high needs and expectations for my graphic cards.
The main problem for me is that after years it does not seem to have
and controls for the fans so they spin at 100% all the time and make a
lot of noise.
The install
To install the drivers I followed the NVIDIA on Fedora desktops guide.
Which is just these few commands since there is no secure boot on this system:
sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
# wait here until the module is built (the command should show a version)
modinfo -F version nvidia
# reboot
Sway
Since I run sway there are a few more tweaks needed.
The wiki states: "The NVIDIA proprietary driver isn't officially supported here" source.
Support is not great.
I added an /etc/sway/environment file as recommended by the guide above.
SWAY_EXTRA_ARGS="$SWAY_EXTRA_ARGS --unsupported-gpu"
WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS=1
In addition I needed sway-nvidia.
git clone https://github.com/crispyricepc/sway-nvidia
sudo install -Dm755 sway-nvidia/sway-nvidia.sh "/usr/local/bin/sway-nvidia"
sudo install -Dm644 sway-nvidia/sway-nvidia.desktop "/usr/share/wayland-sessions/sway-nvidia.desktop"
sudo install -Dm644 sway-nvidia/wlroots-env-nvidia.sh "/usr/local/share/wlroots-nvidia/wlroots-env-nvidia.sh"
After that I was able to select Sway (NVIDIA) from the login screen
and boot successfully into sway with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
One interesting side effect of the driver changes was that I needed to
run a sudo flatpak update and a re-login before things like Signal
started to work again.
Conclusion
In conclusion: don't get NVIDIA graphic cards in 2026
if you want to run linux.
The open source driver is still not ideal and
the proprietary route is not any better.
(Both got significant better and simpler to use since I tried this experiment ~4-5 years ago.)
04 Jan 2026
I love the fact that nix systems configurations can be stored
in a git repository and then remotely applied via ssh.
There is the good resource in the NixOS & Flakes Book on the topic of remote deployment.
And everyone tells you to use flakes which allows you a more straight forward way to track the used nixpkg versions.
But I was not able to find any good examples of a flake to start out.
Nix people tend to have very convoluted and complicated setups.
As it turns out a minimal config can be very simple:
$ cat flake.nix
{
description = "Basic system deploy Flake";
inputs = {
#nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-25.11";
nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
};
outputs = inputs @ {
self,
nixpkgs,
...
}: {
nixosConfigurations = {
systemA = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
system = "x86_64-linux";
modules = [
./config.nix
];
specialArgs = {inherit inputs;};
};
};
};
}
The used nixpkgs version is defined in inputs.
I used unstable but you can switch that to a released version.
This is reproducible even for unstable as flakes stores a hash for the used version in flake.lock.
This can and should be updated from time to time with:
nix flake update and nix flake show can show you all the configured targets.
The ./config.nix is just the file you had in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix.
This can now be used to deploy assuming the ssh setup is done correctly.
nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#systemA --target-host example.com
Select a formatter to run nix fmt to format all files in this directory.
This is done by adding a formatter.x86_64-linux.
Example:
...
}: {
formatter.x86_64-linux = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.alejandra;
nixosConfigurations = {
systemA = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
...
24 May 2025
You might have heard me talk about the new 10Gbit/s setup I'm running.
Plus there is a chance this is the first blog post in the series of:
Nobody intends to build a data center in the basement. 1
How is that possible? Thanks to Fiber7 a product from Init7,
people (like me) have easy access to 1/10/25 Gibt/s.
Before you asks this is symmetrical meaning up and download.
(I decided against 25G because there is no way to saturate
this much bandwidth right now)
Since this is the first blog post in the series lets start with
where the Fiber meets the first device in my network.
Which is the router as you might have suspected.
I went with the CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS which has an awful name
but great hardware for a decent price.
I also looked at the Zyxel AX7501-B1 which had mixed to bad reviews online
and I'm not familiar with the configuration interface.
The other thing I looked into where the different Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machines
which are probably also nice options.
Due to personal preference I'm not a huge Ubiquiti fan anymore.
And last but no least self build / custom hardware with something like
OPNsense was also an option I considered.
Because OPNsense is amazing and here is the specific hardware I looked at:
In the end I ran out of time and the fact that I can copy & past a lot of
my existing configuration lead to the decision to go with CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS,
and it did not hurt that it is also recommended by Init7 and comes with example config.
My feelings about the UI and UX of RouterOS did not change but it got recently
a new skin so yay progress I guess?
You can read all about that and the IPv6 & OpenVPN setup in previous blog posts:
The Config
Lets go to the config which I could as expected take over a lot from
my previous setup. This makes this setup a mix of my old setup,
the official Init7 example and Michael Stapelbergs config.
(I like to note that I did not run into the Fan issues and DNS slow-downs which Michael had, I assume things improved in the last 4 years)
The core idea is to create 2 bridges one for wan and one for lan like this:
/interface/bridge/add name=lan
/interface/bridge/add name=wan protocol-mode=none
/interface ethernet set [ find default-name=sfp28-1 ] fec-mode=fec91
/interface bridge port add bridge=wan interface=sfp28-1
/interface bridge port
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus1
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus2
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus3
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus4
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus5
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus6
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus7
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus8
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus9
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus10
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus11
add bridge=lan interface=sfp-sfpplus12
add bridge=lan interface=ether1
Getting network connectivity from the uplink is also simple:
/ip dhcp-client add disabled=no interface=wan
/ip address add address=192.168.XXX.1/24 interface=lan network=192.168.XXX.0
/ipv6 settings set accept-router-advertisements=yes
/ipv6 address add address=XXXX:XXXX:XXXX::1/64 interface=lan
/ipv6 dhcp-client
add add-default-route=yes interface=wan pool-name=v6pool pool-prefix-length=56 request=address,prefix
Setting up DHCP and neighbor discovery for IPv6:
/ip pool add name=dhcp_pool0 ranges=192.168.XXX.XXX-192.168.XXX.XX
/ip dhcp-server add address-pool=dhcp_pool0 disabled=no interface=lan name=dhcp1
/ipv6 dhcp-server add address-pool=v6pool interface=lan name=v6server
/ip dhcp-server network add address=192.168.XXX.0/24 gateway=192.168.XXX.1 domain=XXXX.network dns-server=192.168.XXX.5,192.168.XXX.6
/ipv6 nd
set [ find default=yes ] interface=lan managed-address-configuration=yes mtu=1500 other-configuration=yes dns=XXXX:XXXX:XXXX::5,XXXX:XXXX:XXXX::6
On the firewall side one of the more important things to setup is FastTrack
to utilize the hardware otherwise it's possible that not the full performance can
be utilized. (Needs to be done for v4 & v6)
/ip firewall filter
add action=fasttrack-connection chain=forward comment=FastTrack
/ipv6 firewall filter
add action=accept chain=forward connection-state=established,related in-interface=wan out-interface=lan
And the other thing to setup on firewall side is the NAT for v4.
/ip firewall nat
add action=masquerade chain=srcnat out-interface=wan
Last but not least I want to show how to setup port forwards / open the firewall for
applications that should be available outside lets use the port 32400 (Plex) as an example.
/ip firewall nat
add chain=dstnat dst-port=32400 action=dst-nat protocol=tcp to-address=192.168.XXX.21 to-port=32400 in-interface=wan comment="Plex"
/ipv6 firewall filter
add chain=forward action=accept protocol=tcp dst-address=XXX:XX:XXX::21 dst-port=32400 comment="plex"
And the OpenVPN setup is 1:1 the same as before see the previous blog posts linked
further up this post. I was able to export the certificates and just import them
on the new device. Important note here is to export with password otherwise the
required private key is not part of the export which took me some time to figure out.
/interface ovpn-client
add add-default-route=no auth=null certificate=site-to-site-mikrotik-client \
cipher=aes256-gcm connect-to=XXX.network disabled=no \
mac-address=02:40:XX:XX:XX:XX max-mtu=1500 mode=ip name=ovpn-edlibach \
port=1194 profile=default protocol=tcp route-nopull=no tls-version=any \
use-peer-dns=yes user=XXX verify-server-certificate=no
Testing
Now that we have our great setup we obvious want to test that and confirm that everything works.
To test IPv6 i like ipv6-test.com and test-ipv6.com click on the site and get feedback.
The other thing is we want to test if we really are able to saturate the full 10G.
A word of advice if you test with something like speedtest.net depending
on your peer you are not able to test the full 10G.
So preferable use something like iperf3 with the official servers,
but there as well be careful as a single client stream can be not enough
to fully get the 10G speed so try with iperf3 --parallel n or -P n for short.
And last but not least no shout-out to netAlly for the LinkRunner® 10G.
Despite marketing which looks like this: Advanced Multi-Gig/10G Cable & Network Tester.
This thing is not really able to test a 10G link to a random endpoint.
Which is weak for a 6000 euro device.
08 Feb 2025
I just updated the blog post Streaming Setup
to install the latest version of Darkice on Fedora 41.
Or you can use the ansible playbook I create for it: functions/darkice.yml
15 Aug 2024
It is almost 5 years after building my Xeon D NAS,
and my Dell T20 started to fail.
(Well actually as it turned out just the RAM was failing, the rest is still fine)
And here is what I ended up with this round:
- AsRock X570D4i-2t
- AMD Ryzen 5 4500 AM4, 3.60 GHz, 6 Core
- Corsair Vengeance 2 x 32GB, 3200 MHz, DDR4-RAM, SO-DIMM
- Case: Supermicro SC721 TQ-350B2
I was looking for something new with AMD since the Intel boards I seen where less exciting the last few years.
The AsRock X570D4i-2t comes with 10GbE, is mini-ITX sized and takes AM4 socket CPUs.
It can even handle up to 128GB memory which is great since 24GB was not enough to build my FreeBSD packages.
I took the same Supermicro case since I was very happy with it the first time around as it provides space for 4 hot swappable HDDs.
And the form factor is great and it contains already a power supply.
I debated to build a only nvme based NAS but I guess that's and idea for later.
Let's talk about the things I learned/hated.
Starting with minor things: OCuLink is an interesting connector and since I was not sure
if an OCuLink to SATA adapter is part of the mainboard I went ahead and ordered one.
During that I found out that it is not that popular and kinda hard to buy.
I think OCuLink is cool from a technical aspect and is easy to use,
but annoying to buy since it is not wide spread yet.
You might have spotted the 8pin(DC-IN)+4pin(ATX) in the specs for the power connector.
This was supper unclear to me and even with the documentation provided in paper form it was not mentioned.
I needed to consult the full documentation
where on page 25 we can find a drawing for it.
Apparently for 12V you could connect one 8 pin connector, but for a normal ATX you need to connect one 4 pin into
the 8 pin connector and an other 4 pin for CPU.
In the end I'm just happy I didn't fry my mainboard by trying to connect power to this board.
Things getting worse: I own now 3 CPU coolers for this CPU.
The first one is the stock fan which came with the CPU and I had intended to use it.
When starting assembling it became clear that this will not fit and I need a LGA115x fan.
Fair enough I missed that the first time I looked at the specs.
I got one from aliexpress because it is supper hard to find coolers for LGA115x.
A week later when I tried to install this fan I learned that only some LGA115x will
work or I would need to remove the already installed backpannel for the cooler.
This at least to me is the worst design decision by ASRock not to go for a standard cooler mount.
I ended up with Cooler Master I30 I50 I50c MINI CPU Cooler 2600 RPM Quiet Fan For Intel LGA115X 1200 And M-ATX Radiator.
Good news is a lot of people talk about overheating issues as far as my few day testing showed,
this case and the fan do a good job to keep things cool.
Last but not least I'm not sure who's fault this is but the case front panel connector does not match the mainboard's
System and Auxiliary Panel and I needed to resort to connect these two components manually.
Meaning I needed to first find the documentation for the case which was harder than expected.
It is not in the manual for my case.
I needed to resort to looking up a mainboard which uses this connector and search for it there.
Luckily the X10SDV Mini-ITX Series
documentation contains a the pin layout.
Apparently this thing is called JF1 and the manual contained infos on how to connect.
Here is how it looks:
In summary it runs now for a few days and I'm slowly making sure it runs
all the things I need mainly backup and
building FreeBSD packages.
And I can report that everything runs smoothly and the extra CPU and Memory help to build my packages faster.
In addition a lot of people online had problems with heat, which is something I did not observe yet, everything runs cool.