Stream of consciousness about my NAS setup

Warning: I’m sleep-deprived, and it’s delulu hours 😵‍💫 ☠️.

I’m missing the filesystem mutability on my NAS. I don’t want to move out of Fedora and its ecosystem. So maybe Fedora Server, or CentOS Stream, or AlmaLinux, or Rocky Linux. I think CentOS Stream would be like a happy medium. I could still use Homebrew for various binaries.

I’m also kind of thinking life is too short to fuck around with per-server Zsh configs. I’d just keep Bash as the default shell, but I’ve been spoiled by syntax highlighting and autosuggestions. Fish shell has these out of the box. But Fish shell is not POSIX-compliant, so I’d have to either learn its syntax in order to do some automated command lines or just run Bash as a subshell for those. Or I could just… do without syntax highlighting and autosuggestions. Maybe I can get used to Bash completions to make it a little more efficient. Idk.

And do I really need to fuck around with starship.rs configuration and fastfetch and all that fancy crap? It gets kind of annoying when recent versions of those binaries are not available in the distro’s repos. Have to get them from Homebrew or cargo or pipx. Why tf can’t everything just come from one place. Should I just use Arch on my NAS lmao? Nah that would just be stupid. But I heard CachyOS is working on a server-focused variant. Distrobox is a no-go because I need native access to the zpool and ZFS datasets, and no, prefixing distrobox-host-exec to the commands doesn’t work for some things.

I think CentOS Stream with Zsh would be fine. I can just clone zsh-user/zsh-autosuggestions and zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting from GitHub into /usr/local/share. I can keep it automatically updated with dnf-automatic, and have it send me an email via the Resend API when a reboot is required. I’d also be able to route system mail to my inbox via the Resend API with Postfix. I couldn’t get Postfix to work on uCore (Fedora CoreOS) because of the read-only filesystem and permissions issues. And trying to get Postfix running in a Podman container based on jessfraz/dockerfiles/postfix was a shitshow and a half. I can benefit from stable and fairly recent versions of Podman and friends. I can install ZFS. So this setup should be fine – at least until a butterfly flaps its wings in New Zealand or some shit and the currents of chaos trigger quantum fluctuations in my brain and cause me to get annoyed enough by something to use another distro. But I think I’ll be using it for a while until that happens. Like, probably.

My poor internal NVMe on the NAS is probably like, “JFC another reformat and distro install?! Will this madness ever end?!” Sorry, buddy.