I bought a Beelink PC for $125 off Amazon when I was considering an RPi. It's hooked up to my 65" TV. It runs plex, Youtube and Spotify and they is about all I want it for. I usually view 1080p movies but have done 4k without any issue unless they were bigger than 6 gigs.
It has been great and I have no complaints, except the wifi seems I bit slower on some torrent downloads than my laptop which is just 7 feet away from it. (I haven't delved into that to see if it is actually happening and if I can fix it.)
At the same time, I bought another for my elderly parents and they have used it for web and email with obviously no problem. They should be good with using it for that for another 5 years or more, assuming no hardware malfunction.
Overall, I would buy another BeeLink.
I've been supplying relatives with ThinkCentre Tiny for about $80 and they are great – https://amso.eu/en/products/lenovo-thinkcentre-m710q-i3-6100...
I've been trying to find one to replace my 10 year old i5 NUC, but there's so many mini-PCs! My wish list is a bit exotic, but I'm using it as a general purpose home automation, photo backup, video hosting device, and I also want to run some startup idea websites on docker images. I'd like: 32GB RAM (upgradeable to 64). Low power usage (<10W idle). Good video transcoding support for Plex. Needs to support 2 internal and 2 USB hard drives for BTRFS, so I can lose 1 drive without any problems and 2 for the critical data.
Ive been using a i5 7260u NUC as my proxmox box for sometime but my parents need to move from their 2010 pentium dual core to something more current. I thought of giving them the nuc (I don’t want them to have to deal with driver issues or unknown reliability) and I got myself a beelink s12 pro (since I can put up with those things)
I haven’t even booted it yet but I’m starting to think that a I should get them a Lenovo tiny and just keep my nuc as is. I hadn’t thought about the bios malware and now I’m concerned.
The main reason I went with the n100 was the power usage for me (my power is 50c/kWh, theirs is like 1/10 that). The nuc is around 20-30w average, I guess I can put up with that.
Every time I look into using underpowered ARM SBCs as a desktop replacement, I come to the conclusion that I really like the thought of using them more than actually using them.
It would make the coolest paper weight that I own, though.
The whole idea of an SBC is to use it when you can’t use any other form of computation, like for example an IoT on a tree that will collect some logs in the middle of nowhere, or a robot, or maybe as replacement for a poor-specs embedded device, trying to use it for anything else like a server or a desktop replacement is just naive thinking, unless it’s only for fun and pushing-the-limits purposes.
At bare minimum never trust the operating system that comes on cheap PCs. re-install the operating system yourself.
On a harder level: there is no way to know if the drive firmware has un-destroyable malware, or the boot firmware is compromised. (update the firmware yourself for sure at minimum, not sure thats even possible with most hard drives)
I’m glad to see this because I have been debating getting a used computer or a cheap desktop to run as a torrent box but haven’t had any good recommendations come my way. Ideally, I want to run a Linux distro on it and have it sync everything over to my Mac which has plex on it.
I’m curious if others have done something similar?
rpi is still super useful for me in many cases, just not as a regular desktop. And I don't understand why they keep trying to sell it as one.
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Clickbait title.
I recently switched from a Pi4 to a Wyse 5070 ($35 second hand off eBay if you're patient). Apart from HomeAssistant, it's running all of my local services. It's significantly faster. It's also running from an SSD instead of SD, this is a big deal because SDs are known to die pretty quickly.
The undisclosed hero feature is QuickSync. Jellyfin was practically unusable on the Pi4.
The only thing I'm missing is somewhere to slot in an Arc GPU. I'm pretty certain that some light local LLM inference would be possible.