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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 9th, 2023
  • Deckweiss@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Multi system synced/living OS possible?English
    1·
    11 days ago

    I run this somewhat. The question I asked myself was - do I R-E-A-L-L-Y need a clone of the root disk on two devices? And the answer was: no.

    I have a desktop and a laptop.

    Both run the same OS (with some package overlap, but not identical)

    I use syncthing and a VPS syncthing server to sync some directories from the home folder. Downloads, project files, bashrc, .local/bin scripts and everything else that I would actually really need on both machines.

    The syncthing VPS is always on, so I don’t need both computers on at the same time to sync the files. It also acts as an offsite backup this way, in case of a catasprophical destruction of both my computers.

    (The trick with syncthing is to give the same directories the same ID on each machine before syncing. Otherwise it creates a second dir like “Downloads_2”.)

    That setup is easy and gets me 95% there.

    The 5% that is not synced are packages (which are sometimes only needed on one of the computers and not both) and system modifications (which I wouldn’t even want to sync, since a lot of those are hardware specific, like screen resolution and display layout).

    The downsides:

    • I have to configure some settings twice. Like the printer that is used by both computers.

    • I have to install some packages twice. Like when I find a new tool and want it on both machines.

    • I have to run updates seperately on both systems so I have been thinking about also setting up a shared package cache somehow, but was ultimately too lazy to do it, I just run the update twice.

    I find the downsides acceptable, the whole thing was a breeze to set up and it has been running like this for about a year now without any hiccups.

    And as a bonus, I also sync some important document to my phone.