This is a list of my personally preferred tools and software. This is entirely subjective, but I do explain my reasoning for my choices.
Please note that these are simply what I prefer to use on my personally-owned systems. Kindly refer to my proficiencies for a full list of my IT skills.
Operating System
For bare-metal x86-64 systems, I generally use Arch Linux due to the smaller (albeit more frequent) updates. I tend to use newer AMD/Nvidia hardware, which means I need a newer Linux kernel. Also, it’s UNIX-like, as it is with any other Linux distro. Arch Linux is a general-purpose OS, and it works great for my servers, gaming PC, and my main hypervisor.
Otherwise, for a virtual machine I will typically use whatever OS is recommended by the app developer.
Runners-up would be Debian and FreeBSD.
Hypervisor
Because I run almost everything on Linux (except for a few other UNIX-likes sprinkled here and there), and because VMware licenses can be troublesome for individual (non-corporate) admins, I use the built in KVM hypervisor in the Linux kernel in conjunction with QEMU. It handles any guest OS that supports virtio drivers (including Windows).
The hardware IOMMU passthrough also worked very well, and I used it to pass my desktop’s GPU to Windows 10 for some games, until Valve’s Proton software made that all unecessary. It was cool while it lasted!
All of my personal servers are hosting apps using either KVM/QEMU or Docker. I’d like to look into FreeBSD’s bhyve sometime.
Containers
I use Docker for the situations where I don’t need to spin up an entire paravirtualized environment for an app. Developers like it and it’s commonly supported, so that’s really it.
Text Editor
I use Vim, because I dislike the repetitive strain the CTRL-key paradigm places on the pinky. Also, most UNIX-like systems will have a vi variant installed. All the other benefits are incidental to me.
Filesystems
For Linux, I use BTRFS wherever I can. The subvolume snapshots, modern CoW features such as de-duplication lured me in. It’s also tightly integrated into the Linux kernel, unlike ZFS. RAID10 has not given me issues on my NAS. I encrypt my BTRFS partitions with LUKS. I use EXT4 on severely RAM-starved environments, but even 1 GiB of RAM seems to handle CoW-enabled BTRFS.
Online Hosting
I host apps (including this website) on virtual machines or containers running on my own x86-64 (AMD Ryzen) physical servers. I built them out of generic PC parts, because dedicated server appliances are very, very loud. They also need proprietary power supplies. I do miss having dedicated management interfaces and ECC memory, though.
Once the app server is running, I expose them to the Internet using Cloudflare Tunnel instead of directly port-forwarding.
Web Framework
I built this site using Hugo. The theme is Luke’s Hugo Theme.