Happy to be part of the top 1% in this case.

PiHole with the Star Trek web UI theme. I think it looks pretty nice and has worked well for me.

That would be more than capable. Retro emulation can run on very low end hardware.

But here’s an ebay listing for same model that I bought earlier. It doesn’t include an SSD but you can buy M.2 SSDs for very cheap which I also did. Plus they’re much faster and more reliable than micro SD cards.

It’s very easy to open the machine up which I liked.

RAM upgrades are cheap too but 8GB is a lot for most cases.

A lot of corporate environments use these so when they upgrade you can find them used for dirt cheap, if you don’t mind some possible cosmetic defects. Mine are just stacked on a shelf and I just use them as servers for docker and whatnot.

While I love Raspberry Pis and have a few older ones, it’s a shame that the latest ones were very hard to come by and far exceeded the $35 price point.

I was looking to upgrade to a Pi 4 a while back but prices were outrageous or it was sold out completely. I eventually discovered tiny form factor PCs.

I bought some used Lenovo Tiny ThinkCentres (which are about 10x more powerful than a Pi 4), off eBay for ~ $70. I upgraded the Ram and SSDs and they are quite capable, low power units!

So to anyone looking for a low power computer to run Linux, consider buying used off eBay. You can get some pretty good deals on used hardware that’s more capable.

Ya my paranoia only allows me to expose Wireguard to access everything. I sleep better at night knowing that’s the only thing exposed. Too many instances of major companies getting hacked who have dedicated security teams to manage that. I am one person, learning to manage my own stuff in my free time.

DHARMA stations (from the show LOST)

Arrow, Swan, Flame, and Pearl so far :)

Edit: also funny to see there’s 108 comments as of now