I bend Linux to my will so you don’t have to. Workstations, laptops, tablets, servers, phones — press the button, watch the chaos organize itself.

I prefer a simple clean UI based on a reproducible Linux ecosystem, with customizations that make sense and eliminate friction.

Linux is the house. Everything I ship lives on it, talks to it, or is trying to become it.

• I had to build a few things to make that happen:
  • Reproducible Linux installers that turn “fresh ISO” into “daily driver”.
  • Dotfiles that keep that machine mine — keyboard, WM, editor, the lot.
  • A GrapheneOS phone suite that looks and works like the Linux I actually want. Same family, same verbs. Android now; native Linux next.
  • A Wayland shell for Linux phones, so the suite has somewhere to go.
  • A local‑first AI assistant on hardware I own. Skippy-Tel and Tailscale connect the rooms of that private cloud. They are not a substitute for it.
  • A keyboard layout for every platform I touch.

Where the open source ecosystem falls short, I fork it and grow it.

Yes, it’s opinionated, but that is why it’s good.

The mobile market is overrun by two equally non‑valid options... then there are Linux phones, also not valid but for different reasons: way underdeveloped, many issues, and not enough financial backing to make it a viable market — yet.

So while we wait, my daily is a Pixel 9 Pro running GrapheneOS, and I've replaced the stock experience one app at a time.

The store

• XX-Apps (private) — the suite store. One login (Skippy username/password), one catalog, updates from the house forge. Not Play. Not F-Droid. Not Obtainium.

On the phone

• XX-Launcher — text‑first Android launcher (Kotlin). No icons, no wallpaper clutter. Search‑first drawer, 8 home slots, inline folders, gestures, widgets, theme presets, JSON backup. The design ancestor of everything below.
• TxxT (private) — SMS in the same style as the launcher, with a few extras to cut out the noise.
• XX-Dialer (private) — pretty much the same as TxxT but for calls, with a ring policy attached: spam never rings, starred contacts always ring, everyone else rings only inside their allowed time-window.
• XX-Contacts (private) — a UI over the system address book. Not a second contact store, not CardDAV, not a dialer. Ring policy stays in XX-Dialer. No INTERNET.
• Nope-Mode — selected apps go silent and un‑openable, on a schedule or on demand. Focus Mode for GrapheneOS, where Digital Wellbeing doesn't exist. Runs as device owner; no accounts, no network, no analytics.
• XX-Calculator (private) — Its a Calculator, that matches my theme. BigDecimal engine, no Android dependencies in the math.
• XX-Email (private) — Gmail without the proprietary Google blob. Tabs, snooze, undo-send, operator search. No Play Services, no analytics.
• XX-Clock (private) — clock, alarms, timers, offline. Per‑alarm ringtones.
• XX-Weather (private) — ZIP in, forecast out. NWS first, Open-Meteo if NOAA is down. No location permission, no Play Services.
• XX-Files (private) — a real directory tree (File.listFiles()), not MediaStore “Recent / Images / Downloads”. Per‑volume trash, 30‑day restore. No INTERNET.
• XX-Keyboard (private) — swipe-first English keyboard with Colemak and Piercing layouts. Glide typing, no INTERNET permission, no proprietary Google blob.
• XX-Auth (private) — offline TOTP/HOTP. Secrets stay in the Android Keystore. Scan a QR or paste a URI. No network, no cloud account, no telemetry.
• XX-Camera (private) — Pixel-class camera: AUTO, MANUAL, panorama/360. Writes JPEG/DNG/video on the phone. No INTERNET. The library is XX-Photos, not this APK.
• XX-Auto (private) — a driving screen for a phone in a mount. Big targets, black ground, gets out of the way. Now playing, thumb-sized play/skip, opens XX-Maps, dials a favourite. Can launch itself when the car's Bluetooth connects. No INTERNET. The rest of this list has Linux server counterparts in the repos.
• XX-Photos (private) — private photo library on hardware I own. Phone client plus FastAPI server in the same repo. Timeline, backup, albums; tagging stays on the server.
• XX-Audiobook (private) — FastAPI server + Kotlin/Compose client in one repo. Audiobooks, ebooks, podcasts, RSS from my NAS. Not a storefront account.
• XX-Vitals (private) — a cleanroom Google Fit replacement: entered on the phone, Postgres on my own NAS, no cloud anywhere.
• XX-Note (private) — Keep's front end over a folder of Markdown files on my own NAS. Every note is one plain file with frontmatter. Delete the app and lose nothing. Go server in the same repo.
• XX-Calendar (private) — Skippy-Tel CalDAV. Shows you your day. That is the whole pitch. The CalDAV backend lives in the same repo. DAVx⁵ is leftover if you still need Google invites.
• XX-Drive (private) — private cloud like Synology Drive, minus Synology. One Go binary on the NAS; native Android and Linux apps that look and work the same. Files stay files on disk. Not there yet.
• XX-Maps (private) — offline-first navigation. Vector map from one local file, on-device search and routing, turn-by-turn in Skippy's voice, all with airplane mode on. Online adds live traffic, a community hazard-report network, and ALPR-aware routing.
• skpp‑radio (private) — a local radio station on the Skippy-Tel-Network. FastAPI server + Kotlin phone client in the same repo. Listen on the phone, drive house speakers by zone, air spots on a schedule. Skippy writes and voices the ads if you want them.

One family theme, set once. They work alone or as a suite.

The suite repos are private for now while the apps settle. XX-Launcher and Nope-Mode are open; the rest install through XX-Apps.

These apps will probably work on other versions of android, but its not tested. Any app that reaches out to a server, make sure you have Tailscale installed (or Headscale) and point the app at your server. Done.

And where it's all headed:

• XX-WM — a minimalist Wayland shell for Linux phones and tablets. Text‑first, gesture‑driven, AMOLED black, Space Mono. No icon grids, anywhere. Calls, SMS, lock screen, notification shade — all first‑class surfaces. The Android suite above is the rehearsal; this is the venue. Working toward this being my daily driver.

Which brings us to...

This is the backbone. The phone is a client of a Linux house. Skippy lives here. The suite servers live here. A fresh ISO becomes a daily driver here.

• linux-mod — one installer for Arch, Artix, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Void, openSUSE, and Alpine. Full workstation or mini (tablets, lean boxes). Menu‑driven (gum → fzf → whiptail). Resumable. Dry‑run. Distro differences live inside the module, not in a pile of forks.
  • Hyprland, Sway, i3, bspwm, Awesome, Qtile, DWM, herbstluftwm, GNOME, Cosmic
  • NVIDIA + CUDA, Microsoft Surface kernel, printers, gaming extras, Docker, Tailscale
  • Variants for workstations, servers, tablets, and phones
• Per‑distro trees I still keep: Arch, Debian, FreeBSD, plus mini for tablets (arch-mini-mod, debian-mini-mod)

• Piercing-Dots — one repo to keep the machine updated and configured. Hyprland is the daily. GNOME is the tablet. The other WM configs are still in the tree.
  • Waybar, kitty, Neovim, Yazi, Tmux, GIMP — customized into minimal yet fully functional powerhouses
  • Super+/ opens the Cheat Sheet; Super+S opens a bash‑driven settings menu — don’t leave the keyboard
  • System updates, package manager, audio, Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, wallpaper, backup, users, mirrors, clean — from that menu
  • Neovim replaces VS Code and Obsidian on this box

The suite backends, Skippy, and the mesh all run on Linux I own. Phone apps talk here. Native Linux apps will talk here too, same look, same verbs.

• Photos, audiobook, vitals, calendar, notes, drive, radio — servers already on the NAS
• Tailscale (or Headscale via skippy-tel-network) is how a laptop in the other room is still home
• tailscale-protonvpn-exitnode — docker‑compose: Tailscale plus ProtonVPN as an exit node

Drivers and scripts for hardware that isn’t in the kernel — shipped with the installer:

• Surface kernel support
• NVIDIA + CUDA, assembled for a script, not a weekend
• NuVision 8" tablet Wi‑Fi/Bluetooth/Audio — obscure old tech that could be perfect if it was made with modern hardware
• KooTigers touchscreen/driver utilities — neat little toy that needed some help

• XX-WM — the shell. phoc today; Hyprland when the gestures catch up. Fairphone 5, Librem 5, Furi Phone FLX1. Python + GTK4. No icon grids. This is where the suite goes when the phone is Linux.

• Skippy (private) — the local‑first AI assistant on my own hardware and private cloud. Skippy-Tel-Network and Tailscale connect that cloud. They do not replace it.
  • Skippy is a universal AI:
    • Terminal coding agent
    • Personal assistant with Home Assistant tie‑in
    • Per‑person / per‑location recognition and memory
    • Mobile app remote over the Skippy-Tel-Network (text and voice)
    • Optional Discord presence (text and voice)
  • Home Assistant TTS is a per‑sentence Wyoming bridge that lives inside Skippy.
  • Skippy orchestrates. Bilby builds. Nagatha audits and cleanrooms. They do not share a session.
  • The brain is served locally by whatever model your hardware can manage.
  • Designed to be subscription‑free, secure, private, and only runs on local hardware.
• Bilby (private) — Skippy add‑on: Skippy queues the work, Bilby builds.
• Nagatha (private) — Skippy add‑on: Skippy's independent auditor and cleanroom counterpart.
• skippy-tel-network (private) — Headscale mesh, cross-node sync daemon, Cloudflare LB ingress, split-horizon DNS, location gateway. The federated network Skippy breaths on. Everything else rides on this.
• Skippy-Speaker (private) — drop‑in replacement electronics for Google Home Max–class speakers. Home Assistant voice satellite on hardware I own.
• xx-chat (private) — Mattermost-wire compatible staff/group chat with AI agent tie in, event-log spine, membership walls, agents-as-staff. Offline-first; agents post through the same door people do.
• Roscoe (private) — Skippy add‑on: face‑recognition presence and greetings for home and business sites, served over the Skippy-Tel-Network.
• elder-ai (private) — Skippy add‑on: This is a local AI model trainer. Runs on this box. No cloud.
• Margaret (private) — Skippy add‑on: front‑desk business agent. Answers from a trained facts store, drafts email (never sends), interactive client chat on the website. Local brain only.
• Jal (private) — Skippy add‑on: offline inventory sourcing engine. House catalog, USD quotes, a staff chatbot via xx-chat; everything stays on the machine.
• XX-Stack — let your local AI use every computer you own. Agent contracts, routing policy, an MCP server, and a local inference control plane over Tailscale. Cloud APIs are off unless you switch them on. This is what Skippy started as; it grew alongside as a benchmark tool.
• free-opencode-hermes — a local proxy so OpenCode (and Hermes-Agent) can run from the terminal against providers you already have keys for, or models on machines you own. Keys stay in the proxy, not in the agent.

The 1998 tank‑RTS/FPS hybrid that refuses to die...and I intend to keep it that way:

• battlezone-netcode-patch — netcode patch for BZ98 Redux multiplayer.
• battlezone98-map-generator — AI map‑generation toolchain (bzmap) for multiplayer maps: generation pipeline, format writers, validators, and Workshop packaging.
• BattleZone98-Godot-Map-Editor — a feature rich Godot‑based map editor for the same.
• BZ1-GameWatcher — fork of the multiplayer game watcher.
• skippy-battlezone-map-generator (private) — this one is explicitly for Skippy with lots of testing and future plans in the works. The public toolchain above was extracted from this.
• skippy-plays-battlezone (private) — Skippy plays BZ98 Redux as a real multiplayer opponent: own client, own player slot, own scoreboard line, acting only through the same input path a human uses. **Currently Shelved ** - Skippy needs more data.

• piercingxx-branding (private) — the brand system behind all of the above: color, type, logomark, and voice.
• xx-platform (private) — ops console for the businesses under XX: scheduling, bookkeeping, documents, reminders. Next.js + Prisma + PostgreSQL. Skippy holds the accounts.
• piercing-keyboard-layout — my own layout that no one else will ever use. One layout, every platform: Linux (xkb), Windows, Android/GrapheneOS, and QMK/Vial ortho boards.
• book-list (private) — my ongoing attempt to separate the worthwhile from the well‑marketed nonsense.

• Kotlin + Compose on Android. Python + GTK4 on Linux. FastAPI or Go on the box. POSIX Bash where Bash belongs.
• Local‑first, always: my AI, my inference, my data, my hardware. Cloud is opt‑in or absent.
• Reproducibility over hand‑tweaking; scripts > screenshots (always)
• Text‑first, gesture‑driven, low‑friction UX — on a desktop, a phone, or a lock screen
• Minimal dependencies, sane defaults, readable code, zero drama

• Kotlin + Jetpack Compose
• Python + GTK4/libadwaita + layer‑shell
• FastAPI for house servers; Go when the binary is the product
• Bash, systemd (when needed), gum / fzf / whiptail
• Hyprland (GNOME on tablets; phoc on phones)
• Kitty, Yazi, Neovim, tmux
• Pacman/Paru, apt, xbps, Flatpak… build from source when needed (Neovim Nightly & Yazi)
• Docker/Compose, NVIDIA + CUDA, SGLang, Wyoming/Home Assistant, Tailscale

• Applied entropy: build systems that stay useful as the world changes
• Elegant complexity: hide the sharp edges, keep the power
• Repeatable results: a fresh install should feel like home in minutes
• Local first: if it can run on my hardware, it will...if it cant, buy more hardware
• Defaults with a spine: opinions included at no extra charge

• Email: Don’t

  Open an issue in the relevant repo. If it’s a rant, make it entertaining.