Better yet, look up YouTube videos on how to remove the tracking bits. Sometimes it’s pretty easy, like just unplugging a connector or two (e.g. disabling OnStar is usually that easy). Do that research before buying, then remove it once you buy.

Counter-proposal: no.

Here’s my actual requirements:

• 2 boot drives in mirror - m.2 or SATA is fine
• 4 NAS HDD drives - will be SATA, but could use PCIe expansion; currently have 2 8TB 3.5" HDDs, want flexibility to add 2x more
• minimum CPU performance - was fine on my Phenom II x4, so not a high bar, but the Phenom II x4 has better single core than ZimaBlade

Services:

• I/O heavy - Jellyfin (no live transcoding), Collabora (and NextCloud/ownCloud), samba, etc
• CPU heavy - CI/CD for Rust projects (relatively infrequent and not a hard req), gaming servers (Minecraft for now), speech processing (maybe? Looking to build Alexa alt)
• others - actual budget, vault warden, Home Assistant

The ZimaBlade is probably good enough (would need to figure out SATA power), I’ll have to look at some performance numbers. I’m a little worried since it seems to be worse than my old Phenom II x4, which was the old CPU for this machine. I’m currently using my old Ryzen 1700, but I’d be fine downgrading a bit if it meant significantly lower power usage. I’d really like to put this under my bed, and it needs to be very quiet to do that.

I wonder if it could power a sensor. Something like a soil dampness or thermometer, where you only need a few updates per day. Could be pretty cool for passive monitoring applications.

I’m currently dealing with a wonky WiFi issue, and the weird thing is that I have the exact same chip in two machines (openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed), and the Leap one works fine and the Tumbleweed one is limited to something like 16mbps… And this is an Intel NIC, which are usually pretty good.

Yup. It does do a lot more than the checkbox, but the checkbox itself mostly does mouse movement and click tests.

Yeah, there are some software issues that need to be resolved, but the bigger issue AFAIK is having the hardware to handle it. The few ARM devices with a PCIe slot often don’t fully implement the spec, such as power delivery. Because of that, driver work just doesn’t happen, because nobody can realistically use it.

If they provide a proper PCIe slot (8-16 lanes, on-spec power delivery, etc), getting the drivers updated should be relatively easy (months, not years).

No, it tracks things like mouse movements to see if it looks human or like a bot. Humans don’t move the mouse in a straight line, there’s some jitter and whatnot, whereas bots will look quite a bit different.

AWS’ benchmark is about lambda functions, not compile workloads, which are quite different beasts. Lambdas are about running a lot of small (so task switching), independent scripts, whereas compiling is about running heavy CPU workloads (so feeding caches). Server workloads tend to be more of the former than the latter.

That said, I’m far less interested in raw performance and way more interested in power efficiency and idle and low utilization. I’m very rarely going to be pushing any kind of meaningful load on it, and when I do, I don’t mind if it takes a little longer, provided I’m saving a lot of electricity in the meantime.

if you’re ok with the idle power consumption

I’m kind of not. I don’t need a ton of drives, and I certainly don’t need them to be NVMe. I just want 2-4 SATA drives for storage and 1-2 NVMe drives for boot, and enough RAM to run a bunch of services w/o having to worry about swapping. Right now my Ryzen 1700 is doing a fine job, but I’d be willing to sacrifice some performance for energy savings.

Eh, if they give me a PCIe slot, I’m happy to use that in the meantime. My current NAS uses an old NVIDIA GPU, so I’d just move that over.

I suppose. But once you’ve done it once, you can usually just reference an existing config and change the 1-2 things that need changing. The Arch Wiki is super helpful, and it’s really nice to be able to have it start on boot.

To each their own, I’m glad both options exist.

Eh, it looks like ARM laptops are coming along. I give it a year or so for the process to be smooth.

For servers, AWS Graviton seems to be pretty solid. I honestly don’t need top performance and could probably get away with a Quartz64 SBC, I just don’t want to worry about RAM and would really like 16GB. I just need to server a dozen or so docker containers with really low load, and I want to do that with as little power as I can get away with for minimum noise. It doesn’t need to transcode or anything.

Linux works great on ARM, I just want something similar to most mini-ITX boards (4x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, and RAM slots), and I’ll convert my DIY NAS to ARM. But there just isn’t anything between RAM-limited SBCs and datacenter ARM boards.

If there were decent homelab ARM CPUs, I’d be all over that. But everything is either memory limited (e.g. max 8GB) or datacenter grade (so $$$$). I want something like a Snapdragon with 4x SATA, 2x m.2, 2+ USB-C, and support for 16GB+ RAM in a mini-ITX form factor. Give it to me for $200-400, and I’ll buy it if it can beat my current NAS in power efficiency (not hard, it’s a Ryzen 1700).

Yeah, kinda dumb. But they do have a relatively popular workaround: the x-system. So forĝejo becomes forgxejo (x = diacritic for the prev letter).

Eh, I just took it out to plug in my Game Boy/Game Gear.

Yup. I’m thinking of making a blog series or something about my setup. It’s a little complex, but the individual pieces are pretty simple, so anyone with time and interest could totally replicate it. Mine would focus on Linux, but since everything is in containers, it could easily be replicated on Windows as well.

Oh, and I’m working from the worst possible setup, I’m behind CGNAT, so I have to go through an outside server to make my internal stuff public. A lot of people can just use their router IP instead, which eliminates the VPN entirely (just port forwards from your router).

I want context for that funky C̶

As a lifelong troll, I would’ve just generated a new pub key and made a bunch of commits as you. Then two days later, I would tell you what’s up once you had time to process the confusion.