Anyone here using a MiniPC for a homeserver for self-hosted apps? What are you using and what's your setup?
Discussion
I use old dells. But some of their newer "miniforms" are pretty slick. But it depends on your budget.
I see, I haven't heard of the miniforms, but their optiplexes I heard are used by a lot of enterprises. I was a bit confused between their later ryzen micro optiplex's 7000 series.
Here's the one I'm talking about https://youtu.be/-ieQPGrbDfE
Weird my reply dident post. anyways try 2 lol.
I didnet even know they did AMD builds. I mostly know the miniforms from work.
I was wondering if I had to worry about x86 v x64 regarding Debian or most of the self hosting stuff will run in either
I had to make a similar decision while switching over from RaspbianOS x86 to x64 while that version was released for my pi4. However, ever since the switch things have been smooth sailing for all the self hosted apps I wanted
it to run. Do you have a list of self hosted apps you’d like to run?
Off the top of my head just nostr relay from umbrel, and maybe just poke around umbrel.
There have been many pi projects, that didn’t really require gpio, where I glanced over and then remembered pi’s were way over priced. I know you can easily add gpio to a nuc/miniPC if needed.
The affordable x64 options all seem to come from companies like bmax or beelink which I’ve seen good things said about on YouTube, but there are tons of these dell & hp x86 slight older mini pc’s that institutions are essentially tossing out the window that are alluring, and in my basic consumer mind won’t be melted a year later 💁♀️
intel nuc really the only option + pop os or just buy from system76.com
The intel nucs are a great deal for the price, probably do want one of those at some point… pi 4 is selling for 190 (8gb) 170 (4gb) and looking at mini pcs that have 8gb for 100-150 as an alternative
what is the rectangle ports on the intel nuc’s is that gpio?
They even sell one barebone (with out ram for 160) with 8gb for 209
Years of consumer pc shopping it’s hard to let my mind by something labeled celeron in 2023
Yah it must be i3 or above
https://www.reddit.com/r/intelnuc/comments/csj71g/does_the_nuc_have_gpio_pins_like_the_raspberry_pi/
is this not a rubber cap that covers up some pin out (maybe not gpio) but some pin out? 
I did at one point consider Intel NUC. I was about to buy them because of their reliability and great service support. However, I was lucky enough to find a Lenovo M75q gen2 tiny miniPC for a good price running Ryzen and a good integrated GPU performance for some minor gaming. I'm currently running Ubuntu 22.04 on it.
I love everything system76 too! Great builds there as well.
🙌
intel and amd don’t make it easy to differentiate either, might be Mac centric thinking on my part that you have to worry about arm compatibility
I see, I haven't used a Mac before, so I can't say much there. However, you will probably feel a bit close at home with a Linux environment with the shell usage.
I’ve been running win 10 on my 5,1 and have played around with Ubuntu and Ubuntu studio which is was impressed with, lots of foss music stuff I have to bring myself to macOS comes built in, I also tried elementary OS which all Mac only people need to try.
Agreed, beelink does make the miniPC's more affordable. However, I am a bit vary about placing trust on them with regards to service, warranty claims and temperature management.
I managed to grab a good offer off of ebay for a lenovo M75q gen2 ryzen miniPC a few weeks ago and it's been running great so far. It's very silent and occupies a lot less space on my desk. I can leave it running always. Allows upgradable RAM, M.2 NVME SSD and space of an additional SATA SSD.
Also, I agree. Pi's did get overprices ever since the chip shortage and the prices didn't drop as much. They are still a little hard to find online, but are available in stores here like Microcenter. You could also check https://rpilocator.com/?instock
Raspberry Pi running Yunohost.
Very nice! I haven't used Yunohost before as I'm more of a self verify and manually install apps kinda guy. However, I'm liking their offering of applications in their application catalog.
✋ a Intel nuc 8gb ram for my node and some node apps and a little older hp elitedesk for my relay, some bots and webapps... working perfectly ✌️
few intel nuc’s for my ln node, docker host… and some as esx server 🙈