FreeBSD, Workstation and … Home - Part 1 🏡 🌸

This article has been on my mind for months, yet it never seemed to fully take shape, until now. The last time I had a dedicated desktop workstation at home was between 1999 and 2001, in a small one-bedroom apartment in Dublin. I worked at IBM back then, and we were already allowed to bring home computers to work. Yes, it was 1999, and remote work was already happening. I had laptops since I was 15, but they were never my daily driver. That time in Dublin also marked the last period where I truly felt confident enough to call a place “home”.

In 2001, due to family circumstances, I returned to Italy and began working for Sun Microsystems in professional services across Europe. With that change, my daily driver switched from a desktop to a laptop, and I started traveling constantly. My backpack became my office, and my suitcase, my home. Sure, I technically had a house, but I was rarely there, only on weekends to swap clothes and check in. This didn’t change when I got married or when I started working with RedHat, Canonical, SuSE or freelancing to build OpenStack infrastructures across Europe. The pattern remained: my laptop was my workstation, my backpack my office, and hotels and suitcases my home. It was a strange paradox: though I had a roof over my head in various cities, I never felt I truly had a place of my own. It became a running joke with friends: “Where are you living this week?”

My digital life evolved in parallel with this nomadic lifestyle. With no stable place to rely on, I couldn’t keep hardware in my house except for archiving purposes. A constant paranoia set in: what if my laptop got lost, stolen, or broke? My entire life, in digital form, was on that device. If I needed a document, I couldn’t just go back to my house and grab it from a binder. To avoid this, I turned to sync services (Dropbox) and became my lifeline for backing up and sharing everything. In a way, my laptop became my digital home.

This lifestyle continued until the pandemic hit, forcing all of us to stay in one place. It was quite the experience. Beyond the challenges the pandemic itself presented, for the first time in over 20 years, I stayed in one spot. No more hopping from hotel to hotel, or from house to house, or from country to country. It left me confused, to say the least. I realized, for the first time, that I had never truly settled anywhere, and I didn’t even know where “home” was anymore.

Throughout the pandemic, I continued using my MacBook. For the first year, it was just the laptop, but eventually, I realized that an external monitor and keyboard might help ease the strain on my eyes, especially since I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. This setup became the norm for me, as many of my colleagues had similar arrangements, mostly with Macs, external keyboards, and mice: it was the industry trend. But even with this change, my fundamental use of the laptop didn’t shift much. I was still preparing for the possibility of being on the move again. My mindset hadn’t adjusted to the idea of staying put permanently. I was unsettled and uncomfortable, largely due to my living situation. In hindsight, I realize that the external monitor, keyboard, and mouse gave me the subconscious feeling that settling down might actually be possible, even though, consciously, I couldn’t picture it any other way.

In September 2022, I met Eva online, a brilliant engineer, while seeking technical advice on a NAS setup. She quickly became my tech muse. Her dedication to her desktop workstation was something I didn’t quite understand at first. But over time, it planted a seed in me, that a desktop system could actually serve as an alternative to the laptop I’d relied on for so long. It was a conscious realization: maybe an alternate lifestyle was possible. What if I could have a desktop workstation as my primary setup, and a lightweight 13-inch laptop for the occasional trips I had to take? What if I could have a home?

(continues in Part 2)