Look on eBay for USFF PCs. They’re mini computers the size of paperback books that are designed for use in large organisations, and they’re made by the usual suspects - HP and Dell mostly. Because they get replaced regularly they’re cheap but they’re just regular desktop PC hardware. A ten year old i5 can handle being a 4K media centre no problem and can be had for €/£/$70.
TIL that NextCloud can use an external database.
It’s cloud all the way down.
Kinda, but also that Clippy (real name Clippit, as it happens) was included as a feature that was genuinely intended to be helpful. Like, that’s not to say it was successful, or appreciated, but that it came from a time when you could buy a product in the expectation that you’d own it, you could keep it and it’d work for you, not for someone else.
In Enterprise: manageability. It’s hard to overstate how powerful Windows Group Policy is. Being able to configure every single aspect of the OS and virtually all major applications, Microsoft or otherwise, using a single application that can apply rules dynamically based on user, device, user or device groups, time of day, location, battery level, form factor, etc, etc. Nothing on Linux comes close, especially when simplicity is a factor, and until it does most large organisations won’t touch it with a barge pole.
I used to have an iMac that I loved (screen was excellent) but it quickly became a shitbox (because Apple) so I turned it into a X Server for my far more powerful Linux box. Is there a modern equivalent of that? Basically turn it into a thin client?
Edit: for kiosks, Windows 10 can be quite happy on 1GB RAM, but that 16GB storage is a problem.
One hundred percent go for USFF. Even the cheapest, most basic processor will smash server roles because it’s not having to power desktop applications, graphics, window managers, etc.
The rolling release thing isn’t for me, but I get why that model might appeal. Brave, though? Why?
Yeah, I have this conversation and lot on the sad truth is that until there’s a Linux distro that’s as manageable as Windows is with Group Policy, no big organisation is adopting it. Unfortunately, nothing in the Linux space comes close.
To be honest, I used to have an ISP with dynamic addresses and it wasn’t a huge deal. The address only changed every month or two. I used afraid.org’s dynamic DNS service to get a dynamic address that followed the changes and created CNAME records for my real domain pointing at that. The actual connection was fucking awful but the dynamic IPs never caused any problems.
As for services: Nextcloud is well worth looking into for file sync and photo backup, especially if you’ve already got a file server running.
As it happens, I’ve just finished setting up a system exactly like this for a completely off-grid setup. I needed a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to be completely self-contained to monitor an adjacent, larger system that is only powered up intermittently (close enough that the two systems have a common ground).
Short version: the Raspberry Pi and the Huawei LTE router I’m using for connectivity draw a steady 9W between them (there’s a lot of monitoring going on). I went with an old pair of 80W panels in very suboptimal positioning, a simple MPPT charge controller and a 110Ah deep cycle leisure battery which costs about €45, €30 and €120 respectively. The system has been running a few months now and the battery had never, ever dropped below 12.4V. The Pi uses WireGuard to connect to my VPS so Home Assistant can be accessed with a web browser since the network I’m using on-site doesn’t do public IP addresses.
Honestly in rare situations that a device like that needs to be accessible from the wild Internet I think it’d be mad to expose it directly, especially if it’s not manageable as you suggest. At the very least, I’d be leaning on a reverse proxy.
I don’t know why but I thought they were some special inaccessible computers.
It’s their marketing. Marketing, marketing, bullshit and marketing. Macs get viruses, Macs have vulnerabilities, Macs crash. Doesn’t matter how much their indoctrinated fans might claim otherwise, Macs are just weird PCs. In that context, their refusal to allow their owners to control them is all the more jarring and makes owning the older models like you mentioned all the more sensible.
BBC Radio 6 and ABC Triple J are two ad-free radio stations that play a lot of new music and are staffed by passionate and qualified DJs. A lot of my music discovery is from listening to those.
Is this loss?