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MacBook, Ubuntu Server, Herdr, Mosh and Tailscale

The last year I have been experimenting a lot with my computer setup.

I used both Omakub and Omarchy for a while, and even tried Windows(!) and plain Ubuntu. All of the experimenting inevitably made me end up with the following setup:

Macbook + Ubuntu Server, using Mosh, Herdr and Tailscale.

Why back to MacOS?

As much as I liked a lot of the Omarchy opinionated setup, I ended up having many small issues here and there that at the end of the day caused frustration and kept me from doing the work.

One day I simply decided it was too much fiddling and tinkering around for too little actual gain apart from curbing my curiosity.

Why Ubuntu Server instead of Omarchy / Arch?

Why having a local Ubuntu Server at all?

The initial idea came from Scott Tolinski and his setup shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0sEM9ijkTE.

He used a Mac Mini for the setup, but conveniently I had a Beelink mini-pc available after my experimentation, and wanted to put it to use.
The great thing about it is that it offloads my MacBook and doesn't fill it up with all projects.

Furthermore it allows me to have all my projects (ca. 30) constantly running, with daily back ups and rsyncing of assets etc. for each project.
I also have long running agents per project via Herdr, and everything is always ready to go regardless of my macbook being turned off in between.

Every morning I have all projects available for development in a fresh state and with 100% local copy, both db, code and assets.
I've set up a dashboard with monitoring of disk space, memory usage and all project url's (like mailhog, dev url and cron-job status).

Herdr

For a while I did the setup mentioned above from Scott, with Mosh and Tmux, but over the summer I decided to try out Herdr.

Herdr was such an improvement that I can not recommend it enough. All the small things that bothered me with Tmux (mouse usage, copying text, adjusting tiling sizes, clearer definition of active pane ++) was solved in Herdr, and packed conveniently together in a very visually appealing and coherent solution.

What about Omarchy Quattro?

Now with a new release from Omarchy, it got tempting again to dive back into it.

But I feel like I have gone the whole round fairly recently, and have learned what I need. What I really need is a terminal-setup that is great (Herdr), a dev-setup that is robust and non dependent on the machine I work on (I now have with the Ubuntu Server), and MacOS for all the convenient everyday tools I rely on (Photos, iMessage, Find my, Airdrop, reMarkable desktop app, CleanShot, iA Writer, Facetime, Logic Pro and more).

Full current setup:

Main machine:
MacBook M1 2020 model (16gb ram)

Dev machine:
Beelink SER8 AMD Ryzen 7 8745HS 64G DDR5 5600MHz + 2TB Crucial SSD running Ubuntu Server

Monitor:
ASUS PA27JCV 5K

Speakers:
Edifier M60s

And Apple Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard.

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