No, it’s nothing sinister. Most user-facing business workstations run Windows and have a Windows COA or, more recently, have the Windows product key baked into firmware, so it’s easy-peasy for the seller to install a fresh, working copy of Windows. The Dell WYSE PCs are Thin Clients, which are used to access Windows (or another OS) running on another PC or a server somewhere so the Thin Client doesn’t have or need a license; this means it’s not easy for the seller to install a hassle-free version of Windows since it will immediately start pestering the user for a license and for novices they’ll assume the computer is broken and return it. The lightweight Thin Client OS they use is neither use nor ornament outside an enterprise settings so they don’t bother reinstalling that. Obviously the seller could install Linux but the majority of people who are okay with Linux would probably sneer and say “ugh, Distro X? I only use Distro Y” and reinstall anyway, so it’s easier just to sell it without an OS. Ask me how I know all this.

Edit to add: some thin clients do have strange architectures and use weird OSes but that’s not a concern here. Aside from size and specs, the only material difference between the WYSE 5070 and a “normal” PC is that the EFI will have limited configuration options, but unless you’re planning on installing Windows XP that’s probably not an issue.

Edit to add to edit to add: I just found this https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/5070/. It’s a detailed breakdown of the device and mentions that it could be speced with an onboard SPF NIC? That’s crazy. It also shows someone modding a second NVMe drive into it.

Yeah, that’s pretty good. The only things I’d be wary of with that particular listing are that it doesn’t come with a power supply (these normally take laptop-style PSUs) and 64GB of storage might not be enough once you start to get to grips with it though you could easily upgrade the NVMe SSD (or hook up an external USB drive).

But aside from that it’s a smart little system and will handle a the setup I described with no issues. The J4105 can be sluggish with multitasking in a desktop environment but for ‘headless’ setups it’s excellent and uses very little power.

No.

Unless there’s something about the RPi that you really want - GPIO, say - it’s not a good choice, especially not the 1GB model you mentioned. Virtually any used desktop or laptop PC from the last fifteen years will be more useful; if you’ve not done so already, search EBay for “USFF”. Those are desktop PCs the size of paperback books. Businesses love them and have them in fleets which means they tend to get cycled out naturally after a few years; the marketplace is full of them and can be had for €30 and up. Unlike a RPi 3, they usually come with storage included (and a proper SSD/HD rather than an SD card), a good quality power supply, plenty of I/O and, if course, a nice solid protective case.

Example: https://ebay.us/m/TxL4yR

Slap PROXMOX on that and you’ll have the seed of a solid home lab. With 8GB RAM you’ll have enough to run VMs for OpenWRT, Home Assistant, Yuno Host, and still have enough resources left over for your Debian tinkering box. Plus, by using PROXMOX you do away with the need for a KVM since you can either SSH into the VM or use PROXMOX’s web UI to access the console and use a GUI if that’s more your speed.

Get a domain name and use that for your email; most providers let you set a catch-all that delivers everything to one place. So if you got, say, strawberrypigtails.egg you could give every service you sign up for a different address: ebay@strawberrypigtails.egg, sdf.org@strawberrypigtails.egg, pornhub@strawberrypigtails.egg and so on. Then, when you start getting loads of spam, you can look at where the email was sent to rather that where it came from and either take action against that service or just block emails sent to that address.

I have a lot of time for Eaton kit. As others have said, not cheap but seems to work well. I’ve not used APC in a while but they used to make good hardware, even if their software was dogshit.

+1 for Home Assistant, and then with Add Ons it can also do other useful home network stuff (network ad blocker, VPN, *arr, etc).

Yeah, me too. Two VPSs (one Helsinki, the other Nuremberg) each with a couple of IPs. Been running perfectly for years aside from when I fuck them up.

Is this loss?

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.