¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Once upon a time, a few mistakes ago, I wanted to start a blog series about doing projects with my two Raspberry Pi units at home.

The initial post described my vision, but it was never followed upon. There was a mix of reasons for that:

• lack of time and proper prioritization
• being overwhelmed by choice
• a desire to stay digitally disconnected¹
• lack of structure in this blog²

Needless to say, my motivation is still well alive, and I have an itch to move forward with this project this year. Let’s see how it will flow.

I want to start by commenting on my ideas from 15 months ago. New Thiago reviews old Thiago.

For a long time I’ve been wanting to do something useful with them, while increasing my DevOps toolkit knowledge.

And trying out new tools and workflows that I am not able to try at work – either because they don’t make sense there, or due to lack of prioritization.

The roadblock to do so was the most classic excuse: lack of non-interrupted time.

There’s plenty of motivation, and ideas. These will likely never run out, any time soon.

Still true! Hah!

There’s no guarantee I will follow up on all of these ideas but,

I can foresee the future! 🔮

Guiding principles

a.k.a. rules of engagement

My revised goals:

1. It must run unix → unchanged.
2. It must be vanilla / upstream → unchanged.
3. Every software installation must come from a package → packages are still OK, but I am opening up the possibility for container images as well (e.g. via docker or podman). Ad-hoc installations are still explicitly ruled out, UNLESS they are scripted in an idempotent manner e.g. via Ansible or pyinfra, but only as a last resort.
4. It must have no X11 nor Wayland nor a graphical system → unchanged. Web server management interfaces are acceptable though.
5. Software updates must happen with a single command → unchanged. These days I have sd_world. A custom Justfile recipe would also be acceptable: just update or just upgrade or just world.
6. It should be reasonably popular and well-supported → unchanged. No abandonware.
7. It should support Raspberry Pi (the ARM architecture, for that matter) as a first-class citizen → unchanged.

Revised distributions / operating systems:

• Debian — RaspberryPi OS
• Fedora
• Alpine Linux
• Arch Linux (Arch Linux ARM)
• Gentoo Linux
• NixOS
• FreeBSD
• OpenBSD
• openSUSE: I decided that, if I invest in the .rpm world, Fedora is the way to go.
• Ubuntu: I decided that, if I invest in the .deb world, Debian is the way to go. Ubuntu remains solid for commercial / enterprise usage, but this is a personal project.
• Void Linux: too niche, no enthusiasm for Void Linux in my circle these days. If I ever tried it, I feel it would be used as a Desktop distro.
• Slackware Linux: updated on 2025-09-11. Too niche, no enthusiasm for it in my circle these days.

This list is still quite large. I will need to trim it down further in the following days. Stay tuned.

Now it’s shorter: 4 less distros. Progress!

One big question is whether I’ll treat my Raspberries as pets or as cattle.

To be continued ■³.