No, those are terrible.

Is it the Mini variant? I have the G4 Mini with an i7-8700T. Great little machine.

A word of advice: If yours is the G4 Mini, and you run it headless (no monitor), you’ll likely run into random crashing/freezing. I’m assuming you’ll be running Linux, so if that’s the case, it’s really easy to fix by appending an extra command at the end of a line in /etc/default/grub.

OP has a budget of $150. I doubt they are going to be running a full suite of self-hosted replacement services right off the bat. The machine in question is perfectly suitable for quite a lot of things.

What is that infographic from? Looks like Home Assistant…

And yeah, I’d second the commenter suggesting you look for a second hand computer somewhere instead of buying HP.

The HPs OP is looking at are secondhand.

notice the bit about pushing it… say transcoding all the streams etc.

6th gen Intel CPUs support quicksync. This is a non-issue for most self-hosters.

I don’t know what or how it will be used… thus saying should be fine.

Here are some stats for my particular HP Elite 800 G3 Mini (i7-7700T/32GB RAM) over the last 18 months, running various VMs and LXCs with varying services (including the VM running my media stack from which my kids stream music and shows quite frequently):

Peak CPU usage is never more than 50%, and the vast majority of memory usage is just cached. Actual memory usage by each VM or LXC is far lower. The IO delays…that was user error (my NAS was having issues at the time).

Don’t get caught up in having a completely un-stressed machine. Too much overhead means wasted potential.

Everyones mileage varies no talk about network either, far too many variables to consider thus saying it should be fine!

Fair, but we’re talking about the actual machine on which the services will run - not the network. If the network is garbage, then the $150 machine isn’t going to matter a whole lot.

Ah, gotcha. Well, the G4 w/i5 is more than plenty to get started.

unless pushing it with something like media files/jellyfin/plex/nextcloud. Nextcloud for example needs few resources but running anything nice would soon crawl.

Not really. The HP Elite 800 G3 mini and G4 mini make up 2/3 of my Proxmox nodes. The G3 currently hosts the VM that runs my entire media stack (Plex, *arrs, TMM, torrents/usenet, etc), and it’s not stressed at all

Those are great little PCs, I have a G3 and a G4 (plus a handful of other minis and SFFs).

If you can, grab an i7-7700T off eBay, it’s maybe $60 at the top end. It’ll drop right in.

Of course, because why wouldn’t a checkes notes entirely local operation require an internet connection?

You can also just not attach the TV to the internet

That’s what I did with the curved Samsung TV that I put in the basement for the kids. Factory reset with no internet, default input set to a specific HDMI, and a Roku (with Pi-hole handling adblocking). Roku remote also handles TV power/volume. Haven’t had any issues with it.

You can turn off HDMI input scanning on roku TVs.

Knowing Roku, they probably automatically re-enable that setting after an update.

Secondly, block *.logs.roku.com with a pihole was my solution. That TV is the single most banned traffic on my network still.

Fucking seriously. The two Rokus in my house are the two most-blocked devices.

Louis is right.

You jest, but Windows already tries to limit installations outside of the microsoft store on a default OS install.

We have an older curved 55" Samsung “smart” TV that I put in the basement for the kids. Mounted high up on the wall, out of reach of little destructive fingers.

Turns out it can be configured with a default input. When I moved it to kid duty, I cleared out all the wifi credentials (I think I just factory reset it), disabled all the “smart” garbage I could find, then stuck a Roku stick in it and set that input as default. The Roku remote handles TV power and volume, and the Samsung remote is put away with the rest of my tech hoard stuff. Pi-hole on my network removes the Roku’s ability to show ads at all. I always forget that there’s a big ad spot on the home page.

Proxmox and Docker serve different purposes. Proxmox is a hypervisor, while Docker handles containerized services. There is a little bit of crossover when it comes to containers (Proxmox can host LXCs, kinda sorta a little bit similar to Docker containers), but that’s really the only commonality.

If you want to run multiple services and have a playground to mess around with and learn things, Proxmox is what you want. Spin up a VM (or 2, or 3) for Docker, and run your Docker services in those. You still have the ability to dick around with other things in Proxmox without having to worry about fucking up everything else on the physical machine.

Android is open source and look what Google is trying to do with that.

Tailscale is going public, so I don’t really trust them anymore. I used Cloudflare tunnels for a while, but I strongly dislike being dependent on them for accessing my own network, and I don’t like how they recently clamped down on “anti-piracy”. There are some legitimate sites I still can’t access (dirtbike parts and whatnot) because Cloudflare straight up blocks access to them.

Because you are hosting the server software on your own hardware. That’s literally self-hosting. Plex provides a way to remotely access your server through their own network as well, which is optional.

Jesus christ Nintendo

Edit 16 hours later: This makes me want to sell my Switch outright. I rarely play anything on it, usually I just game on my PC or N3DSXL (which is modded, naturally).