I agree and already got two minipcs I selfhost a lot of stuff now. I just now realized it is basically the future Gabe Newell predicted and wanted to make with Steam Machines [1], but he was wrong by targeting gamers and a little too early (perhaps?). Maybe they will succeed precisely because of this revolution.
I got soooo tired setting up a gaming system for parties on my projector. There are so many various problems and tweaks, gamepads disconnecting if you put a hand between the gamepad and the pc/playstation etc. BSODs on windows, driver problems and stupid obscure things varying from pc to pc. I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations. I am too old to debug this stuff to play a game for so little time, I would rather not. I didn't really believe in steam machines at the time, but now I sort of do, especially with game streaming and local LLMs that might be hosted there now.
> I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations.
How so? A console is literally a gaming PC.
I can see the point of “need multiple consoles because game X isn’t on console Y” or “I’d like to play an RTS/MMO that isn’t on a console” but since you mentioned gamepads that point mostly dies.
I also haven’t ever had a PS5 or Switch controller lose link from a console because someone walks or stands between myself and the console.
wishfish · 1h ago
Looks like they'll be trying out the console / small box form factor again.
I'm glad they are. There's probably a sizeable market for a console that runs PC games smoothly at 1080. And could double as a PC. If they get it to the size of an XBox Series S or smaller, I would probably get one.
ibaikov · 1h ago
Wow that's cool, Gabe is an underrated CEO. Thanks for posting this since I do not follow anything gaming anymore.
I hope they'll fix their rumored team wars inside the company.
jsheard · 1h ago
Valves big misstep with the Steam Machines was that they expected developers to port their games over to Linux natively, on their own dime. Needless to say that didn't end up happening at any significant scale, so when they resurrected SteamOS they refocused on Windows binary compatibility through Proton.
StopDisinfo910 · 1h ago
It’s an iterative process.
Valve launched Steam Machines with their own OS and started shipping a version of Steam on Linux with predictable library versions. At the same time, they started working with the Wine project and shipping things which is now called Proton but is actually the cumulative results of their own patches.
This paved the way for the success of the Steam Deck when adequate material became available.
I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.
rkagerer · 1h ago
Counterpoints:
- Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc)
- can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstalling and reconfiguring OS's, services and software).
- less supported over time (I can still download driver upgrades in some cases, and find solutions if I run into something unexpected as the vendor is still in business and supporting the legacy model).
Full sized machines aren't difficult to build, and I've had great luck with second hand enterprise-targeted parts (eg. for a long time years back, used Mellanox Infiniband cards were dirt cheap on eBay because universities were upgrading to later generations, they were an order of magnitude faster than NIC's available at competing price points at the time, and as a bonus had lower latency). Older Areca RAID cards were great for SATA drives, easily upgradeable to new models, and I still have a few kicking around in production today.
Meanwhile neighbors have thrown out piles of ewaste and wasted time after their commodity junk failed unexpectedly.
HeyLaughingBoy · 32m ago
Sometimes size matters, tho. I came into MiniPCs from a Raspberry Pi solution. Our Pi's had to display multiple videos onscreen and weren't fast enough (I think the standard at the time was RP4), so we switched the critical ones to MiniPCs but they had to be small & light enough to hang off the back of a VESA mount on a TV suspended above a gym floor.
vorpalhex · 1h ago
Power consumption matters.
You can also run a single storage box and then just pop over network (10gbe, thunderbolt, etc). One big box of spinning rust and tons of cheap compute.
Most folks are running proxmox and your OS installs are automated. Use ansible. I like docker swarm on top of a fleet of cattle vms on proxmox.
lostmsu · 1h ago
I'm thinking of a beefy mini-PC + USB-C 8+ hard drive enclosure.
I feel like I rarely upgraded anything except GPU and storage. And GPU's are not needed for a server.
Enclosure means easy storage upgrade and I can always reattach the enclosure to another machine quickly. Might even install OS on the enclosure, then the whole setup will survive compute upgrades until the predominant architecture changes.
jauntywundrkind · 34m ago
Exactly this. I don't even have a nice multi-drive enclosure, just a small swarm of toaster-style dual-drive holders. They're absurdly cheap. (Alas one of the recent purchases was maybe too cheap: wont let me adjust the various drive spin down/power savings settings. But this is a first for me, and they've all been very cheap).
Unfortunately a lot of the mini-PCs skimp on USB ports. AMD's FL1 form-factor mobile "socket" has 4x 10Gbps + 1x 40Gbps USB-C ports on the SoC, but many of the designs often only have ~2x usb3 class ports and rarely the USB4 port at all. I'd really appreciate these mini-PC's exposing more of the chip's usb! Definitely something to shop for.
With USB4, there's also the added benefit of having host-to-host interfaces: it's short range but 40Gbps host-to-host is real nice to have (in practice it's often half or less this speed alas).
Upgradability is over-rated, when costs are low. A Minisforum 795S7 can be had for $400, and has dual ("only" PCIe 4.0) SSD slots and a 16-core 7945HX Zen4. It's mobile-on-desktop (MoDT): I can't ever replace the CPU, but I suspect this crazy cheap system is going to have a long long life before I feel the need to upgrade it. Replacing it whole when the time comes seems not a concern. RAM and SSD are separate and can be moved out if desired.
Normal_gaussian · 2h ago
I have a homelab which is a zimaboard, a dumb netgear switch, and six mini-pc's (5560U/16GB/500GB).
The zimaboard runs pfsense & an nginx reverse proxy, then all six of the mini-pcs run proxmox. 4 mini-pcs run k8s clusters (talos) and the other two run home services and selected one-offs (home-assistant, plex, bookstack, build-tools, gitea, origin servers for a subset of projects).
It was a lot easier to set up than I had expected. Its was still a massive PITA though. I got what I wanted out of it work-wise, and its a nice little novelty.
I've been thinking about ditching most of it for a while; I like the idea in the article about breaking it up - move one under the TV, one into the office, one under the stairs, and the remaining 3 + zimaboard I'm tempted to sell. I'd keep running proxmox on them, but I wouldn't link them up. The key thing that needs to happen for this to make sense is using something like cloudflare to route domains.
The part I never sorted properly was storage. It has 3TB of storage, but getting that storage into k8s for proper dynamic allocation without giving random nodes CPU perf issues was a too-long-for-one-session task which meant it never got finished. I was tempted to add a NAS, but most NAS's are horrid.
vorpalhex · 1h ago
What were the underlying storage needs?
Ceph ebds are pretty easy and can offer good resilience but definitely have some performance issues in a standard homelab.
Something dumb like smb/nfs actually can work quite well if your workload doesn't mind it.
Rclone volumes work quite well for some cases not served by obvious other solutions but you have general FUSE limitations.
D13Fd · 2h ago
This does sound like a massive PITA. what is the point of it? What are you using it for?
yeah that is exactly what came after the work use case
Normal_gaussian · 1h ago
Initially I needed a lab to practice deploying & upgrading & disrupting on-prem talos linux for k8s, and design benchmarks around it. So 4 machines does that. The zimaboard in front with pfsense (which is a PITA by itself) and nginx is a good way to make it pick-up-and move (ie. internal networking config). For <£2k the set up is very cheap for what is being tested. It meant I didn't have to go and sit on the other side of a security checkpoint for most of the work. It was cool to keep around as its trivial to make the lab guests unable to see my home network and vice-versa.
Now I often have the 4 k8s hosts off. But use them maybe once a month.
cdkmoose · 2h ago
I have repurposed retired laptops for my tech lab at home. They no longer keep up with the current software bloat for wife and kids usage, but make reasonable linux servers. Currently serving up 3 databases on one, kafka and networking on another and services/applications on a third. They take up very little space under my desk.
Havoc · 2h ago
> So you mean to tell me you’ve been using your torch to take a shit this last week because your light bulbs don’t work without the PC you watch Netflix on?
This made me laugh. I’ve currently got a home assistant controlled floor standing light in my bathroom because all the old school switch ones in ceiling are dead and landlord is being well a classic landlord
giardini · 2h ago
For a small price (probably less than the cost of a "home assistant controlled floor standing lamp") you could buy parts to repair the bathroom lighting?
Better yet, pay someone to do it (and maybe show you the hows and the hazards). Then you could be living like a true American.
And without risking the "standing lamp" falling into your bathtub!
micromacrofoot · 1h ago
it's the landlord's responsibility, you're a sucker if you pay a dime to fix what they own... especially considering the unfamiliarity with previous work and safety risks involved
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 1h ago
yeah agreed that tenants should buy smart appliances to replace non-functioning fixtures instead!
micromacrofoot · 1h ago
no, the landlord should fix their property in a timely manner or they should sell it to someone that will
a $20 lamp you get to keep is smarter and safer than fixing someone else's property doing unlicensed electrical work at your own cost and without their permission... why does this even have to be explained?
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 59m ago
>unlicensed electrical work
Are you from the US? The overwhelming likely fixes to "my bathroom light won't work" are not work that would require skilled electrical work or a permit. The cost is also not likely to be more than a floor lamp, and the tenant can also keep the fixture when they leave.
Also many jurisdictions (willing to bet covering a huge plurality of Americans) would let you subtract the cost of necessary repairs from your rent.
micromacrofoot · 48m ago
I'm glad you've only ever worked with pleasant landlords who don't have dangerous electrical work in their apartments, but this is not my experience
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 38m ago
Plugging a floor lamp into a bathroom electrical socket is going to reduce your danger?
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 2h ago
What does a "dead light" mean in this context? Your landlord isn't changing your bulbs?
I've mostly lived in 100+ year old homes with old janky wiring and have never had a light fixture die, just bulbs.
tenacious_tuna · 25m ago
Not OP, but I'm in a similar situation: I have a two-way switched pair of lights on my stairwell, one light at the base, one at the top. The one at the top does not work. We've tried replacing the bulb, we've tried fiddling with the cable for it (it's a suspended lamp). It hasn't worked since we moved in. We've told the landlord twice, he said he'd call his guy, his guy hasn't shown up.
I would like to have a light in my stairs. It's hard to see at night in the winter. My solutions is going to be to spin up home assistant, a zigbee base, and some fairy lights on a 'smart' switch.
I could learn the skills to troubleshoot why the electrical connection is (apparently) bad to the lamp, but given that said connection is in the walls, my DIY skills are trash, and I'm scared of electricity, I'm gonna do the project that's more fun and lines up with some stuff I wanted to do anyway.
I have no idea why the lamp doesn't work, especially because the fixture at the base of the stairs does, but the landlord insists it worked before we moved in.
JdeBP · 1h ago
In fairness, note that in some countries (like mine) there are tighter regulations for electrical circuitry in rooms with baths and showers, which require work in that sort of area (problems with the pull switch, a joint box, or the ceiling rose, for example) to be done or at least overseen by a qualified electrician. They're known as "Part P" in the United Kingdom.
That said, bringing in a mains-powered non-IP-rated portable floor standing lamp because the ceiling mounted one is broken is definitely not the intended outcome of such safety standards.
giardini · 1h ago
It likely means the OP has poor handyman skills and wisely has chosen not to learn by him/her self due to safety hazard. After all, these circuits are usually ~110 volts and there is almost always an unintended ground nearby (a water or gas pipe, a wet bathtub, etc.).
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 1h ago
Learn how to change a lightbulb? Is that a handyman level skill?
giardini · 1h ago
Sadly yes, b/c even the simplest things can go wrong quickly. E.g. people sometimes change light bulbs w/o turning off the power. Have you ever experienced a dead (or good, for that matter) bulb coming apart as you twist it out of the socket? Would you trust a naive person to properly handle that situation?
With power off(easy case)?
With power on(difficult)?
justsomehnguy · 1h ago
You are conflating naive and a barely functional human being.
If someone doesn't know what the electricity zaps and couldn't think two steps ahead then they definitely should be anywhere near a power circuits, operating a car or be allowed to vote.
EDIT: of course it should had been 'shouldn't be anywhere' but it's even better, so I leave it as is.
micromacrofoot · 46m ago
you've just excluded at least half of america from voting, however smart you think most people are... the reality is significantly worse
giardini · 22m ago
Can I now take it as confirmation from the two of you (justsomehnguy and micromacrofoot) that at least half of Americans who vote should not be allowed to vote?
If so, this may be the first time an important political question has been resolved without a light bulb turning on (figurative or otherwise).
kjkjadksj · 1h ago
If they can set up a light with home assistant they can screw in a lightbulb. Come on.
giardini · 45m ago
That may be so, but what you say doesn't answer my question: can they unscrew a lightbulb that is literally falling apart as they unscrew it?
ANSWER:
If the power is off, they likely will eventually be able to remove the glass bulb (one piece), examine the situation and then unscrew the metal bulb base (second piece) and then remove any stray material in the (unpowered) socket.
If the power is on, the correct answer is "No, they likely cannot unscrew the bulb. Instead they will likely short the circuit, blow a breaker/fuse and put themselves in a situation where they must call in someone more knowledgeable, (or worse)."
burnte · 1h ago
I recently did a 180 in my homelab. I had been getting better and better equipment, enterprise level, and I found that it took a lot mroe work and was a lot less fun than doing things the way I used to, which had been maximize small low cost systems. I enjoyed the jank, and going enterprise equipment eliminated jank. So I sold all the high end stuff and went back to miniPCs. My main VM host now is a Lenovo P3 Ultra with lots of RAM and storage, and I have a handful of other Dell Optiplex 3090 machines and a bunch of Raspberry Pis to run everything from. I enjoy it more, it's actually more stable, less expensive, quieter, and cheaper.
karmakaze · 1h ago
That's a beefy machine, small in dimension not so much in volume or price. Good expansion space though. I'm seeing 2,669 and 3,502 CAD.
LarMachinarum · 2h ago
having had quite a bunch of MiniPCs, mostly from reputable brands (Intel NUC series back when Intel had those, then Gigabyte Brix series, then some cheapo china ones), I have moved away from those, because every single one of them (independently of the brand) ended up dying spuriously not long after warranty end and in any case far sooner than any µATX desktop would (in fact I've very rarely had any of the latter die; they usually live far beyond their phase out / replacement)
Even without wanting to attribute that to any malicious planned obsolescence, my impression is that the very small size of mini PCs makes it almost impossible for the manufacturer to ensure proper thermal management for keeping all components constantly at a temperature low enough for device longevity.
CharlesW · 1h ago
My 2008 Mac mini is still running, so it can be done. I'm shocked that Intel NUCs weren't more reliable for you.
LtWorf · 1h ago
Only one of my rpis ever broke, the 1st one I ever bought.
glitchc · 1h ago
Yeah a Mac Mini seems to be the only one that can go the distance.
mrbluecoat · 1h ago
Intel chips dominate this space (with a far better price per GHz ratio than ARM or RISC-V); sad to see their slow downfall. Agree with others that you need active cooling to avoid premature burnout.
bdcravens · 1h ago
You can get MFF Dell/HP/Lenovo refurbs from Microcenter (and elsewhere) for 200-300 USD. Typically 9th or 10th gen i5 processors and 16 or 32 GB of RAM. You can fit them into 10 inch racks you can 3d-print (often with matching 3d printed brackets for a proper fit). We've been using them to replace some of our utility servers that we pay way too much for in the cloud (obviously that's a trade off of dollars for being concerned with security/management). We're treating them like cattle, deploying via K3S.
butz · 40m ago
MiniPC must either charge from USB-C or have an internal PSU. Those external power bricks are so annoying when you start adding more PCs to the cluster.
jauntywundrkind · 21m ago
I definitely think USB-C would be a pretty good option!
Another option is getting a dedicated power supply. Mean Well makes a HEP-600-20, with 560W of 20V power. You can power quite a cluster off that! It sucks that they don't take 24v: there's so many 24v power supplies, but 19/20V is quite rare!
I have quite handful of hard drives in toaster-style carriers: having a single high efficiency rugged 12V power supply felt better than dealing with a sea of questionable-efficiecy power bricks.
kylemaxwell · 1h ago
These look like fun technology, but I don’t even know what the use cases would be anymore. I don’t need something to control my lights: I have an actual light switch for that. I don’t have endless terabytes of media that I need to serve within my household, so I just don’t know anymore what I would use this stuff for. Twenty or thirty years ago, I loved having a home lab, but these days I’m just not sure what I would do with it.
JdeBP · 14m ago
It's definitely not something for everybody, and I suspect not really a "revolution" outwith the dedicated enthusiasts segment of the population. (-:
If one wasn't likely to have a rack of desktop PCs at home, one probably will be hard pressed to have a reason for a collection of mini PCs.
On the other hand, there are a few more use cases than just over-egging a light switch or being a big file server. One can replaced dedicated hardware such as network gateways/routers, and do self-hosting, for examples.
There are RaspberryPi systems that one can get with extra Ethernet ports that can be set up to do application gatewaying and routing with general-purpose operating systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, and such. And obviously filtering HTTP/other proxies incorporating spam/advertising/malware blockers are a well-known use case.
There are oddball mini PCs in some parts of the world with loads of serial ports, useful as terminal hosts if one has a lot of systems with no disploy/HIDs. (I saw one mentioned on the FediVerse the other day. It turned out that it was an old Russian point-of-sale system, with 6 serial ports.) More of a use case for someone who already has lots of PCs (with serial ports), of course.
But yes, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone is Kitboga with a server farm in xyr garage running speech synthesis engines and language models to call scammers. (-:
On the gripping hand, I swapped out someone's under-the-desk tower for a mini PC years ago simply for space reasons.
jesuslop · 9m ago
My examples: backup, free RSS and VPN (for ISP annoyances).
LtWorf · 1h ago
How ableist of you :)
The thing is that once lights are computer programmed, you can program them. For example I had made a program to stop playing music after I leave home because I hated to put the music off and then walk out, but I also didn't want the music to play all day while I was out.
LeoPanthera · 2h ago
Yes indeed, I'm running Proxmox on an Asus NUC Pro... thing. Can't remember the exact name.
I initially was recommended a "Minisforum" thing, which I did buy, but it absolutely hated Debian for reasons I don't understand. It would boot, but not reboot, so you'd have to power cycle it every time. Not practical.
The Asus also came with its own issues - it only supports one stick of RAM unless you do a BIOS update, so you have to be careful not to put both sticks in until after the update. Slightly crazy.
RankingMember · 1h ago
Anyone have recommendations for a particular mini that'll run Fusion 360 acceptably? I know that's generally an app for "main machine" use but I'm curious if any of these have started straying into the performance zone that might make it doable.
bdcravens · 1h ago
Funny enough over the weekend Fusion kept crashing on me, and I have an M3 Max with 36GB of RAM. I've run it on a slightly less machine (but not by much - an Elite Book with a Ryzen processor and 32GB of RAM). Honestly I'm kind of afraid to put it on much less.
RankingMember · 1h ago
Ha, thanks for the data point. I figured it might still be out of reach. I was running it at what could best be described as "sort-of acceptably" (random crashes for seemingly low-lift functions) on a Ryzen 5 desktop with a GeForce 1060 and 32GB RAM.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Not a home lab, but I have one mini-PC dedicated to driving a CO2 laser (that needs Windows). Another one dedicated to StepMania (an open DDR clone).
They're cheap enough that I don't mind dedicating one (or two) for specific tasks.
kccqzy · 2h ago
> You can get MiniPCs with 4-6 internal M.2 slots that are great for building a NAS with.
Where can I find that? My current Intel NUC has two M.2 slots and a SATA connection. If I were to relax the definition of a MiniPC to include mini ITX then yes I can find these, but given how the author talks about being all-in-one, I doubt the author is talking about mini ITX builds.
Currently in Pre-order, but $210 for 6 slots and an N150
jauntywundrkind · 11m ago
There's been a lot of recent offerings like this. Beelink is a pretty great company so this one is particularly tempting, and the form factor is cute as hell.
One thing to note in this recent trend is that these designs mostly use the Alder Lake-N / "Twin Lake" cores, which are quad low-power E-cores (still adequate). But more critically, there's only 9 lanes PCIe 3.0! And some of those lanes need to go to networking, be it ethernet and/or wifi! Often there'll be 1x PCIe lane per SSD. Given that it's a NAS running maybe dual 2.5Gbit, this isn't catastrophically bad (1x can do 8Gb/s), but conceptually I find it a bit dismaying anyhow.
https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/processor-n150.c4109
You can also get larger ones like the Asus Flashstor that can do 12.
LeoPanthera · 2h ago
They're all fairly new. "Mini PC NAS" seems to be the magic Google words. One example is the "Beelink ME mini", which has 6 m.2 slots.
politelemon · 1h ago
What are people doing with 6 M2 slots?
kjkjadksj · 1h ago
Installing 6 m2 drives.
BizarroLand · 35m ago
If you keep an eye out you can sometimes find 4tb nvme drives for ~$200, so you could build an eye watering 24tb raid0 array in one of those that would saturate a 25gb nic for less than $1,500.
Or make it a 5x1 parity for a smidge of redundancy.
layer8 · 1h ago
There are SSD NASes that fit the description, and products like the Beelink ME mini.
mcny · 2h ago
My minisforum mini PC died within two years seemingly our of the blue. Support won't return my emails.
jauntywundrkind · 1h ago
Minisforum is also one of many mini-pc vendors that basically doesn't release bios updates. They might release a couple early on, to try to get systems stable, but after that don't expect any bios updates. AMD will release plenty of updates, & you'll be stuck on whatever it was your system came with.
Different kind of support concern from yours, but also noteworthy. Really unfortunate.
I still have an old HP EliteDesk (i5-8600t) that is my one reliable 24/7 system, still runs fine. Also no bios updates, so I guess there's that. Mini-PCs to me started more as a way to buy cast-off business gear, these small affordable small business systems, even cheaper second hand. It's amazing and great seeing this new market rise up to make interesting mini-pc's, and the value is often still pretty good, but it's a very different character from where the trend started.
layer8 · 2h ago
That’s unfortunately typical for Minisforum. They issue batches of products in a fire-and-forget manner, with hardly any after sales support.
brk · 2h ago
Mine has been going for about 4 years now, no issues.
fckgw · 2h ago
Same issue here. Just no power at all.
clueless · 2h ago
what are some hardware people would recommend (specifically looking for power efficiency)?
shadowpho · 1h ago
N100/n97/n150 are all perfect (about the same perf).
6-10w idle (similar to rasp pi) but 4-10x more perf.
seemaze · 2h ago
I've had luck replacing Raspberry Pi's with Dell Wyse 5070's. They're not screamers, but they are relatively recent fanless hardware with low idle power draw and plenty of oomph to push every service I self host.
klipklop · 2h ago
At the moment a good low power mini PC is anything with an Intel N150.
n150_lp · 40m ago
I've been using one for a few months for home video consumption, it works quite well and is quiet.
vFunct · 1h ago
Mac mini is the perfect. Its also the most power efficient.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 2h ago
Would benefit from one or two small pictures. I guess MiniPC means like a Mac Mini or an Intel NUC?
> You can expect average power draws of 20-50W in usage and 6-12W in idle.
> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W.
Have you measured that? I think my full ATX desktop only idles around 30 watts. (With a bunch of apps running ofc) I took out the GPU to reach that, something was wrong with the power saving, feels like bad drivers.
That said... I'm not totally disagreeing. I have a mini PC running a couple web and P2P services. I'm trying to unburden my ATX so it can shut down at night to save power and do maintenance. And having more computers would shift me away from my "kitten" habits, so I'd abstract over hardware better.
loloquwowndueo · 2h ago
A beelink mini pc will draw about 5w when idle (measured with a watt meter the pc was plugged into). It’s smaller than a NUC (I think!) - it’s slightly bigger than a raspberry pi with a case. Not exactly this model but it cost about us $150.
I got soooo tired setting up a gaming system for parties on my projector. There are so many various problems and tweaks, gamepads disconnecting if you put a hand between the gamepad and the pc/playstation etc. BSODs on windows, driver problems and stupid obscure things varying from pc to pc. I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations. I am too old to debug this stuff to play a game for so little time, I would rather not. I didn't really believe in steam machines at the time, but now I sort of do, especially with game streaming and local LLMs that might be hosted there now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)
How so? A console is literally a gaming PC.
I can see the point of “need multiple consoles because game X isn’t on console Y” or “I’d like to play an RTS/MMO that isn’t on a console” but since you mentioned gamepads that point mostly dies.
I also haven’t ever had a PS5 or Switch controller lose link from a console because someone walks or stands between myself and the console.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Valve-Fremont-Upcoming-console...
I'm glad they are. There's probably a sizeable market for a console that runs PC games smoothly at 1080. And could double as a PC. If they get it to the size of an XBox Series S or smaller, I would probably get one.
I hope they'll fix their rumored team wars inside the company.
Valve launched Steam Machines with their own OS and started shipping a version of Steam on Linux with predictable library versions. At the same time, they started working with the Wine project and shipping things which is now called Proton but is actually the cumulative results of their own patches.
This paved the way for the success of the Steam Deck when adequate material became available.
I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.
- Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc)
- can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstalling and reconfiguring OS's, services and software).
- less supported over time (I can still download driver upgrades in some cases, and find solutions if I run into something unexpected as the vendor is still in business and supporting the legacy model).
Full sized machines aren't difficult to build, and I've had great luck with second hand enterprise-targeted parts (eg. for a long time years back, used Mellanox Infiniband cards were dirt cheap on eBay because universities were upgrading to later generations, they were an order of magnitude faster than NIC's available at competing price points at the time, and as a bonus had lower latency). Older Areca RAID cards were great for SATA drives, easily upgradeable to new models, and I still have a few kicking around in production today.
Meanwhile neighbors have thrown out piles of ewaste and wasted time after their commodity junk failed unexpectedly.
You can also run a single storage box and then just pop over network (10gbe, thunderbolt, etc). One big box of spinning rust and tons of cheap compute.
Most folks are running proxmox and your OS installs are automated. Use ansible. I like docker swarm on top of a fleet of cattle vms on proxmox.
I feel like I rarely upgraded anything except GPU and storage. And GPU's are not needed for a server.
Enclosure means easy storage upgrade and I can always reattach the enclosure to another machine quickly. Might even install OS on the enclosure, then the whole setup will survive compute upgrades until the predominant architecture changes.
Unfortunately a lot of the mini-PCs skimp on USB ports. AMD's FL1 form-factor mobile "socket" has 4x 10Gbps + 1x 40Gbps USB-C ports on the SoC, but many of the designs often only have ~2x usb3 class ports and rarely the USB4 port at all. I'd really appreciate these mini-PC's exposing more of the chip's usb! Definitely something to shop for.
With USB4, there's also the added benefit of having host-to-host interfaces: it's short range but 40Gbps host-to-host is real nice to have (in practice it's often half or less this speed alas).
Upgradability is over-rated, when costs are low. A Minisforum 795S7 can be had for $400, and has dual ("only" PCIe 4.0) SSD slots and a 16-core 7945HX Zen4. It's mobile-on-desktop (MoDT): I can't ever replace the CPU, but I suspect this crazy cheap system is going to have a long long life before I feel the need to upgrade it. Replacing it whole when the time comes seems not a concern. RAM and SSD are separate and can be moved out if desired.
The zimaboard runs pfsense & an nginx reverse proxy, then all six of the mini-pcs run proxmox. 4 mini-pcs run k8s clusters (talos) and the other two run home services and selected one-offs (home-assistant, plex, bookstack, build-tools, gitea, origin servers for a subset of projects).
It was a lot easier to set up than I had expected. Its was still a massive PITA though. I got what I wanted out of it work-wise, and its a nice little novelty.
I've been thinking about ditching most of it for a while; I like the idea in the article about breaking it up - move one under the TV, one into the office, one under the stairs, and the remaining 3 + zimaboard I'm tempted to sell. I'd keep running proxmox on them, but I wouldn't link them up. The key thing that needs to happen for this to make sense is using something like cloudflare to route domains.
The part I never sorted properly was storage. It has 3TB of storage, but getting that storage into k8s for proper dynamic allocation without giving random nodes CPU perf issues was a too-long-for-one-session task which meant it never got finished. I was tempted to add a NAS, but most NAS's are horrid.
Ceph ebds are pretty easy and can offer good resilience but definitely have some performance issues in a standard homelab.
Something dumb like smb/nfs actually can work quite well if your workload doesn't mind it.
Rclone volumes work quite well for some cases not served by obvious other solutions but you have general FUSE limitations.
A man can turn the means into the purpose.
Now I often have the 4 k8s hosts off. But use them maybe once a month.
This made me laugh. I’ve currently got a home assistant controlled floor standing light in my bathroom because all the old school switch ones in ceiling are dead and landlord is being well a classic landlord
Better yet, pay someone to do it (and maybe show you the hows and the hazards). Then you could be living like a true American.
And without risking the "standing lamp" falling into your bathtub!
a $20 lamp you get to keep is smarter and safer than fixing someone else's property doing unlicensed electrical work at your own cost and without their permission... why does this even have to be explained?
Are you from the US? The overwhelming likely fixes to "my bathroom light won't work" are not work that would require skilled electrical work or a permit. The cost is also not likely to be more than a floor lamp, and the tenant can also keep the fixture when they leave.
Also many jurisdictions (willing to bet covering a huge plurality of Americans) would let you subtract the cost of necessary repairs from your rent.
I've mostly lived in 100+ year old homes with old janky wiring and have never had a light fixture die, just bulbs.
I would like to have a light in my stairs. It's hard to see at night in the winter. My solutions is going to be to spin up home assistant, a zigbee base, and some fairy lights on a 'smart' switch.
I could learn the skills to troubleshoot why the electrical connection is (apparently) bad to the lamp, but given that said connection is in the walls, my DIY skills are trash, and I'm scared of electricity, I'm gonna do the project that's more fun and lines up with some stuff I wanted to do anyway.
I have no idea why the lamp doesn't work, especially because the fixture at the base of the stairs does, but the landlord insists it worked before we moved in.
* https://gov.uk/government/publications/electrical-safety-app...
That said, bringing in a mains-powered non-IP-rated portable floor standing lamp because the ceiling mounted one is broken is definitely not the intended outcome of such safety standards.
With power off(easy case)?
With power on(difficult)?
If someone doesn't know what the electricity zaps and couldn't think two steps ahead then they definitely should be anywhere near a power circuits, operating a car or be allowed to vote.
EDIT: of course it should had been 'shouldn't be anywhere' but it's even better, so I leave it as is.
If so, this may be the first time an important political question has been resolved without a light bulb turning on (figurative or otherwise).
ANSWER:
If the power is off, they likely will eventually be able to remove the glass bulb (one piece), examine the situation and then unscrew the metal bulb base (second piece) and then remove any stray material in the (unpowered) socket.
If the power is on, the correct answer is "No, they likely cannot unscrew the bulb. Instead they will likely short the circuit, blow a breaker/fuse and put themselves in a situation where they must call in someone more knowledgeable, (or worse)."
Even without wanting to attribute that to any malicious planned obsolescence, my impression is that the very small size of mini PCs makes it almost impossible for the manufacturer to ensure proper thermal management for keeping all components constantly at a temperature low enough for device longevity.
Another option is getting a dedicated power supply. Mean Well makes a HEP-600-20, with 560W of 20V power. You can power quite a cluster off that! It sucks that they don't take 24v: there's so many 24v power supplies, but 19/20V is quite rare!
I have quite handful of hard drives in toaster-style carriers: having a single high efficiency rugged 12V power supply felt better than dealing with a sea of questionable-efficiecy power bricks.
If one wasn't likely to have a rack of desktop PCs at home, one probably will be hard pressed to have a reason for a collection of mini PCs.
On the other hand, there are a few more use cases than just over-egging a light switch or being a big file server. One can replaced dedicated hardware such as network gateways/routers, and do self-hosting, for examples.
There are RaspberryPi systems that one can get with extra Ethernet ports that can be set up to do application gatewaying and routing with general-purpose operating systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, and such. And obviously filtering HTTP/other proxies incorporating spam/advertising/malware blockers are a well-known use case.
There are oddball mini PCs in some parts of the world with loads of serial ports, useful as terminal hosts if one has a lot of systems with no disploy/HIDs. (I saw one mentioned on the FediVerse the other day. It turned out that it was an old Russian point-of-sale system, with 6 serial ports.) More of a use case for someone who already has lots of PCs (with serial ports), of course.
But yes, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone is Kitboga with a server farm in xyr garage running speech synthesis engines and language models to call scammers. (-:
On the gripping hand, I swapped out someone's under-the-desk tower for a mini PC years ago simply for space reasons.
The thing is that once lights are computer programmed, you can program them. For example I had made a program to stop playing music after I leave home because I hated to put the music off and then walk out, but I also didn't want the music to play all day while I was out.
I initially was recommended a "Minisforum" thing, which I did buy, but it absolutely hated Debian for reasons I don't understand. It would boot, but not reboot, so you'd have to power cycle it every time. Not practical.
The Asus also came with its own issues - it only supports one stick of RAM unless you do a BIOS update, so you have to be careful not to put both sticks in until after the update. Slightly crazy.
They're cheap enough that I don't mind dedicating one (or two) for specific tasks.
Where can I find that? My current Intel NUC has two M.2 slots and a SATA connection. If I were to relax the definition of a MiniPC to include mini ITX then yes I can find these, but given how the author talks about being all-in-one, I doubt the author is talking about mini ITX builds.
Currently in Pre-order, but $210 for 6 slots and an N150
One thing to note in this recent trend is that these designs mostly use the Alder Lake-N / "Twin Lake" cores, which are quad low-power E-cores (still adequate). But more critically, there's only 9 lanes PCIe 3.0! And some of those lanes need to go to networking, be it ethernet and/or wifi! Often there'll be 1x PCIe lane per SSD. Given that it's a NAS running maybe dual 2.5Gbit, this isn't catastrophically bad (1x can do 8Gb/s), but conceptually I find it a bit dismaying anyhow. https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/processor-n150.c4109
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme...
You can also get larger ones like the Asus Flashstor that can do 12.
Or make it a 5x1 parity for a smidge of redundancy.
Different kind of support concern from yours, but also noteworthy. Really unfortunate.
I still have an old HP EliteDesk (i5-8600t) that is my one reliable 24/7 system, still runs fine. Also no bios updates, so I guess there's that. Mini-PCs to me started more as a way to buy cast-off business gear, these small affordable small business systems, even cheaper second hand. It's amazing and great seeing this new market rise up to make interesting mini-pc's, and the value is often still pretty good, but it's a very different character from where the trend started.
6-10w idle (similar to rasp pi) but 4-10x more perf.
> You can expect average power draws of 20-50W in usage and 6-12W in idle.
> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W.
Have you measured that? I think my full ATX desktop only idles around 30 watts. (With a bunch of apps running ofc) I took out the GPU to reach that, something was wrong with the power saving, feels like bad drivers.
That said... I'm not totally disagreeing. I have a mini PC running a couple web and P2P services. I'm trying to unburden my ATX so it can shut down at night to save power and do maintenance. And having more computers would shift me away from my "kitten" habits, so I'd abstract over hardware better.
https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-eq14-n150?_pos=4&_...
PCs take a lot of resources to make. We shouldn't encourage throw away culture any more than is necessary.
Just my opinion, though.