+1 on lower tier Intel CPU mini PC. I have a slew of different boxes by Beelink, Intel, and Asus. The N95 box I bought from Beelink (basically an N100) has been one of the most impressive for being so low power, and yet handling the wealth of services I’ve been running on it (with a lot of overhead yet).

The two are not even remotely in the same category of CPU. This is a comparison of apples to orchards.

You son of a bitch, I’m in.

I’ve become a big fan of mini PC’s for home server use these days (with NAS systems for storage duties). Low power, low heat, low noise, and very affordable.

Beelink on Amazon makes a good selection of them. Always watch for sales. I have several of their machines and have been pleasantly surprised by all of them. The latest addition was one of their N95 systems with 8GB of memory. It hosts Jellyfin, Deluge, Wireguard (client and server), dns, forgejo, etc.

Reasons are usually just newest kernel/mesa/etc. Most of the time the difference is very small, and often inconsequential. However, every now and again there is a major development that might make it worth it (IE: The graphics pipeline that all but made dxvk-async obsolete)

As a C# developer on Linux, I wish this was more true than it is. Working on a multi project dotnet solution in VSCode is still far behind Visual Studio / Jetbrains Rider.

Its also worth pointing out that the more you add to VSCode, the slower it becomes. If you add the toolkits to make it compete with Jetbrains products, it isn’t nearly the same lightweight editor anymore.

Won’t speak to Webstorm, but hard disagree when it comes to Rider. VSCode/Zed really fit into an entirely different category from Jetbrains IDE’s. Lightweight editors vs full fat development environments. There are use cases for each.

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The plugins would almost certainly work in a VM, but I imagine that latency would become a big headache. For my purposes, I picked up a Beelink mini pc and called it a day.

So in terms of DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), Linux already has Bitwig, Reaper, Arour, LMMS, and possibly others. Personally, I find the bigger issue comes from plugin developers (the DAW is your main program, and you add your sounds/effects through plugins). Most companies are not delivering anything Linux native. Many of these plugins can be bridged with compatibility software, and will work fine that way. However, most of these plugins now are also using their own install/activation software center, and they are often a nightmare in Linux.

Music production is the one thing I currently keep a windows mini PC around for these days. It’s not impossible to make the transition to Linux, but the last thing I want when pursuing a creative endeavor is technical software challenges holding me up.

90% sure wireguard (the VPN server) is going to need an open port if you want to connect from the outside.

FWIW: I’m running jellyfin and a whole host of other services on a Beelink with an Intel n95 and 8gb of ram. Runs like a champ.

We are all tired on this day.

Using Firefox mobile, everything works and is mostly performance 🤷‍♂️

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im a big fan of the nas device being single purpose. its life should only exist in fileserving. i have several redundant nas devices and then a big ol app server.

This is the way. Except my “big ol’ app server” is an n95 mini pc that sips power.

Because even if an attacker could gain access even as root he cannot modify system files.

Your comment was already from the position of if an attacker could gain root access. My responses were to that directly, and nothing else.

Your comment also contained

The filesystem itself is also read-only.

Which is what led to the further discussion of root making that not so.

I don’t believe that to be the intent of the OP’s comment, given their second sentence, but they are welcome to state otherwise. I just don’t want them thinking that an immutable distribution gives them some kind of bulletproof security that it doesn’t.

While you are correct, any system is compromised if you have root, so isn’t that irrelevant at that point?

The original context for the comment chain was:

Because even if an attacker could gain access even as root he cannot modify system files.

So no, it’s completely relevant.

Someone with root can run ostree admin unlock --hotfix to make /usr writable. Someone with root can also delete all restore points.

It would be strange for them to call it that if it actually means “completely irrelevant from a security perspective”.

See the comment by superkret.