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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 22nd, 2024

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  • I run a J5040 ITX board for my homelab needs, which has been released a few years ago and has served me well, even through I run it with more RAM than the board specs allow. The natural successors of that are the Atom N100/N105 and the i3 N300/N305 (all 1 Gen newer than J5040) and AFAIK the Atom N150 and i3 N350 (2 Gen newer), all of which are available on ITX boards. Models for the latest chips might be a but rare though, and you might have to go to AliExpress to get one, but for the N100/105/300/305, there’s a wide variety available. Just make sure to get one with enough SATA ports for all your disks, so you can use it for NAS as well.

    Disclaimer: I’m quite sure this is enough for your homelab/NAS use-case, but I’m not familiar with Minecraft requirements, and you might need beefier hardware for that. However, the above boards leave enough room in your budget for RAM, NVMe and HDDs, should deliver quite some bang for the little buck you have, and will barely sip energy, making cooling easy.













  • Mint on my work PC, because my dear IT colleagues made the effort to provide standardized installations for us that are mostly carefree and can just be used; you can even get them preinstalled on a laptop or VM.

    Debian on my work servers, because everyone is using it (we’re a Debian shop mostly) and there’s a standardized self service PXE boot installation for it. Also, Debian is boring, and boring is good. And another thing, Debian is the base image for at least half of the Docker images and alliances (e.g. Proxmox) out there, so common tools. The .deb package format is kinda sane, so it’s easy to provide our own package, and Debian has a huge community, so it’s going nowhere in the near future.

    Ubuntu LTS latest on my home servers, because I wanted “Debian but more recent packages”, and it has served me well.

    Not yet, but maybe Fedora on my private PC and laptop soon, because I keep hearing good things re hardware support, package recency, gaming and just general suitability for desktop use. There’s still the WAF to overcome, so we’ll see.



  • I have no reason to expect any different, but I would have a better night sleep if Shoutrrr were still actively maintained. I get that there may be no features to add, and I’m OK with that, but there are >50 unresolved issues that no one is taking care of, and I would assume that every software needs to be tested against new versions of libs, frameworks, OS releases etc., and I’m not OK with a project not doing that.