Linux

I run my entire digital life on two Contabo VPS servers in Germany. Personal site, photography portfolio, business site, email, password vault, analytics, monitoring - all of it. No AWS. No Vercel. No managed anything. Just Docker, Traefik, and a lot of evenings spent getting things right.

This is not a tutorial. This is a walkthrough of what I actually built, why I built it this way, and what I learned along the way.

The servers

Two VPS boxes at Contabo, both in Germany. That matters to me - European hosting, European jurisdiction, GDPR by default.

Look, I just installed Omarchy on my laptop. Fresh. And yeah, it's amazing out of the box, but let's be honest - you're going to want your own tools. This isn't a generic tutorial. This is what I actually did to get from "nice Linux desktop" to "ready to work."

What is Omarchy, really?

DHH made it. The Ruby on Rails guy. He got fed up with Apple's App Store nonsense and decided to build his own Linux distribution. Not just scripts - a full operating system that looks nothing like the desktop environments you're used to.

Upgrading your system can be exciting, but it sometimes brings along unexpected challenges. Recently, after upgrading my Lenovo T14s from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04, I faced a frustrating issue—my audio completely stopped working. Both the internal speakers and any connected headsets weren’t being detected, leaving me with only a "Dummy Output" for audio.