About the site moria.de

You are inside the colossal cave of moria, stumbling over a twisty little maze of cables. You hear computers humming loudly. Obviously, this is a hacker's place.

There is only one door.

>_

Actually, the network spans across the whole house, and the machine room looks better than the introduction may suggest.

I used to run my own GNU/Linux distribution starting 1992 for 25 years, because distributions did not exist when I started with Linux 0.13, and I never found the need to switch to one, as building and installing used to be straight forward and everything was lean and simple.

Over time, much open source software shows bloat and dependency hell, enforcing to install a dozen packages just for a rather simple target package. Some packages are released with bugs that even prevent building them. A distribution is needed to fix all that at the price of even more bloat and complexity, and often lack of freedom in choices, but in the end, it does save more time than it costs. I use Arch Linux, which used to get less in my way than others, but in 2026 pretty much each update breaks something. The package key management never worked reliably. GUI apps are best run as appimage or flatpak to avoid broken Arch packages. It is a mess.

Here are all machines at moria.de, just the kind of stuff geeks like to read about.

About this site