I love how journalism is all garbage, even the one around technology. It just took a bunch of declarations and suddenly Meta/FB is the target to avoid and cancel. As if there weren’t many more and much better reasons to NOT use those platforms than this simple and expected political realignment.
Well, the problem is… they did: https://developer.arm.com/Architectures/Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
But then came along the Pi guys that should’ve implemented an UEFI to push the market into that direction but never did.
The new Snapdragon X machines actually seem to have UEFIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Damzgq5Bg&t=978s&pp=2AHSB5ACAQ%3D%3D
But we need more, tablets with open boot and drivers are important.
Yet another year, yet another “this is going to be the year of the Linux desktop”.
What would make Linux actually work out was if GNOME got their shit together instead of wasting time and resources on pointless stuff. Another big thing with Linux would be if someone could get some vendor like Lenovo to open all their ARM tablets, implement an UEFI like they should have from the start and provide basic drivers.
Linux is useless for the majority of regular users, at least for work, because you don’t have xyz proprietary software, however it could work out well as a home machine for web surfing and simple documents. People would probably be happy to buy cheap ~200$ tablets from Lenovo and get a full desktop experience from those.
Get them as big as possible (wallet allows to), because you’ll get quickly annoyed at having multiple smaller drives. You’ll have to deal with more space, more cables, more power, more sata expansion, more heat etc.
Note that the adapter on the link does not actually use the USB protocol. It’s still PCIe sent over a USB 3.0 cable that is good enough for the job. But not actually USB, there are no signal / protocol conversions happening.
This is a decent setup if you want to leave the Mini PC intact, with the case and all because it allows you to route the PCIe to outside of the machine using a somewhat solid cable that you can run through a small hole OR the optional port slot (VGA on this machine):
The VGA card can be removed so you have a big hole to pass the “USB” cable through.
They’re selling around 40-50€ here just the CPU, with motherboard and RAM for about 100€ and mini pcs with those around 150€.
They usually have M2/NVMe slots, those can be turned into SATA port easily and cheap in multiple ways:
There are A LOT of ways to convert the M2/NVME slots into SATA ports, some you can get hundreds of hard drives there if you need.
In fact, I already have a mini PC (an MSI Cubi 2 with an i3-7100) that I sometimes use. I’m sure it’s fairly power-efficient, but again, it only has room for one 2.5" HDD, which limits its usefulness for a NAS setup :(
Again, that board has a M2 slot, just use it. OR you can use of this cards to expand that 1 sata port into multiple ones.
what happens if something breaks. Is there any warranty?
If you exclude the Chinese brands (including Lenovo) it is very, very unlikely that a Mini HP or Dell will break in your hands anytime soon. Some even come with extended warranties from companies that bought them and you’ll be able to ask HP for help. But frankly I wouldn’t bother with this, those machines are good hardware designed for 24h7 operation and will not break easily.
Totally, but that won’t be a problem if you’re 8th+ gen right now. I’ve had experiences like you describe with a Core 2 Duo about two years ago, even SSH was taking ages to connect because the CPU lacked some modern instruction for ECDH.
Yeah, laptop CPUs are low power, after all they’re configured to run on battery with Windows. :)
Well it happens :D Happy new year!
I believe you should buy second hand hardware for that. Can’t beat the price and you’ve tons of gamers and offices trying to get rid of perfectly good hardware for what you’re trying to do. I mean a 8th gen i5 CPU will most likely be idle or in low usage most of the time.
I would say to buy i5-8500T or more recent (because you can run a full machine on 8W on that). You can either go for a micro ATX motherboard with that and RAM second hand OR pick an HP Mini ProDesk with the same CPU, both options will be about 130€. Check this example.
The thing with the Minis from HP is that they come with everything, NVME, power supply, ram and ready to go. Most of those more recent machines come with 2x NVME + 1 SATA + USB-C.
If you’re comfortable with taking the board out of the case you can place it anywhere and add a M2 to SATA adapter on both NVME slots for about 22€ each and have like 12 SATA HDDs connected to it. If you don’t want mess with the hardware you can get a USB DAS for your disks, since it’s all USB-C you will not notice any performance impact.
Those machines will outperform your CPU pick by a lot while being cheaper and power efficient on idle.
I’ve a very similar setup, but connection to the remote machines is done via WG. Works fine.
Joplin: Sufficient but no callouts :(
Can you give an example of those “callouts”? Joplin has many plugins, many you can find that in there.
My only complaint about Joplin is that there’s no production / real WebUI for it yet.
Too bad the UI sucks and it doesn’t have a WebUI.
Well, this solves nothing. I don’t really know what’s going on with Thunderbird but it is looking like a piece of crap, the latest UI changes made it worse, a few months after the other revision that was actually much more visually pleasing. Is it that hard to look at what others do instead of adding random boxes everywhere?
Anyways, the worst part is that right now Thunderbird wastes more RAM than RoundCube running inside a browser with the Calendars and Contacts plugins. Makes no sense.
Get a USB-C DAS (enclosure) for your disks, those use their own power supply. Since it is USB-C performance will be very good and stable and you’ll be happy with it.
Well… If you’re running a modern version of Proxmox then you’re already running LXC containers so why not move to Incus that is made by the same people?
Proxmox (…) They start off with stock Debian and work up from there which is the way many distros work.
Proxmox has been using Ubuntu’s kernel for a while now.
Now, if Proxmox becomes toxic
Proxmox is already toxic, it requires a payed license for the stable version and updates. Furthermore the Proxmox guys have been found to withhold important security updates from non-stable (not paying) users for weeks.
My little company has a lot of VMware customers and I am rather busy moving them over. I picked Proxmox (Hyper-V? No thanks) about 18 months ago when the Broadcom thing came about and did my own home system first and then rather a lot of testing.
If you’re expecting the same type of reliably you’ve from VMware on Proxmox you’re going to have a very hard time soon. I hope not, but I also know how Proxmox works.
I run Promox since 2009 and until very recently, professionally, in datacenters, multiple clusters around 10-15 nodes each which means that I’ve been around for all wins and fails of Proxmox. I saw the raise and fall of OpenVZ, the subsequent and painful move to LXC and the SLES/RHEL compatibility issues.
While Proxmox works most of the time and their payed support is decent I would never recommend it to anyone since Incus became a thing. The Promox PVE kernel has a lot of quirks, for starters it is build upon Ubuntu’s kernel – that is already a dumpster fire of hacks waiting for someone upstream to implement things properly so they can backport them and ditch their own implementations – and then it is a typically older version so mangled and twisted by the extra features garbage added on top.
I got burned countless times by Proxmox’s kernel. Broken drivers, waiting months for fixes already available upstream or so they would fix their own bugs. As practice examples, at some point OpenVPN was broken under Proxmox’s kernel, the Realtek networking has probably been broken for more time than working. ZFS support was introduced only to bring kernel panics. Upgrading Proxmox is always a shot in the dark and half of the time you get a half broken system that is able to boot and pass a few tests but that will randomly fail a few days later.
Proxmox’s startup is slow, slower than any other solution – it even includes management daemons that are there just there to ensure that other daemons are running. Most of the built-in daemons are so poorly written and tied together that they don’t even start with the system properly on the first try.
Why keep dragging all of the Proxmox overhead and potencial issues, if you can run a clean shop with Incus, actually made by the same people who make LXC?
You may not want to depend on those cloud services and if you need something not static, doesn’t cut it.
Some people can’t because they need updated proofing tools and that version no longer has updates.