Shepherdess is the name of my present desktop. Gradually it was assembled from the remains of Spitfire but is now a new machine entirely. It is a level 1 hypervisor using Arch Linux (btw) as the host and running any number of virtual machines on top of it, passing through the GPU to those machines which I use as full-blown desktops.
You can see this desktop in the most recent photospheres of my Workspace.
Sometimes I get in trouble with anti-cheat engines for running on a hypervisor. Present virtual machines running on top of shepherdess with periphieral passthrough (including GPU) include:
- NixOS, for most stuff (hostname “divinity”)
- Windows 10, for VR games because I have an HTC Vive Pro 2 with no Linux support
- Windows ME, for fun!
Present hardware specs are as below:
- MSI NVIDIA RTX 3090 (formerly an FE RTX 3070) GPU
- Intel i9-11900K CPU
- 80GiB RAM
- 2〜3 16:9 monitors with only the center one placed landscape
Absurd RAM and GPU needed for local AI imagegen + textgen.
Because this is a hypervisor I don't run any desktop environment on the bare-metal. But here is how my Linux box is configured on top of this hypervisor:
- NixOS + home-manager (formerly Gentoo)
- awesomewm as a window manager on X11
- alacritty as a terminal emulator
- mpd + ncmpcpp for music playback through
- stable-diffusion-webui for AI imagegen
- text-generation-webui for AI textgen