Great advice. I found an old laptop and I’m putting it through the paces now, and I’m really surprised at how easy all of this is. Setting up my own Invidious instance took minutes. Immich is where I’ll need to plateau out, I expect. My partner will immediately fill up the laptop by dumping her phone onto it, so that will need to wait for a long-term solution. That being said, a Lenovo mini whatever seems like a solid standard.

Oh, I can deal with something that’s larger…

-wait, not like that.

Thanks for this, this sounds like where I’m headed. I just hadn’t even considered thin clients/mini PCs, and it sounds like a lot of people are using Lenovos for this exact thing. I’m not at the point yet of doing something big, just small home lab, but I would like to get to the point of hosting immich for the family, and maybe having an LLM or SD in there at some point. But by then I’m hoping the RAMpocalypse is easing up. For now, it’s just privacy front ends until I know what I’m doing.

Thanks - I’ve put it off for a while, and didn’t realize how easy this all was to set up!

Thanks- I found an old laptop to give things a test run. I’ll do some thin client shopping once I cut my teeth a bit.

Yeah, I was looking earlier, and sort of didn’t know what to even look for, but then everyone here made suggestions of what to look for. I’m all over this!

Thanks!

Yep, I forgot we have an older MBP that can still manage minimums for Docker. Already had redlib up on it.

Thanks - I think a NUC/thin client will be how I end up going. I just didn’t even think about them in terms of meeting the criteria of “small thing I can leave running and not care about.” I think I still have an old laptop my partner used to use that would work, which might be my tester.

Will do, thanks!

Thanks - I’ll check them out.

Awesome idea, thanks! I want something that can spend 99% of the time just hiding behind other consoles, and this would work perfectly for that.

Personally, I shuffle photos from my phone to my laptop and then backup manually, which is not awesome. Having my own cloud-based backups for that would be great. Might even get my partner to go for it, which is the hard sell.

Yeah, that’s my fallback idea. I would sort of prefer the ease of a single board option I can just shove behind the router, but this might be easier.

For anyone unsure: Jevon’s Paradox is that when there’s more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.

Case in point: AI models could be written to be more efficient in token use (see DeepSeek), but instead AI companies just buy up all the GPUs and shove more compute in.

For the expansive bloat - same goes for phones. Our phones are orders of magnitude better than what they were 10 years ago, and now it’s loaded with bloat because the manufacturer thinks “Well, there’s more computer and memory. Let’s shove more bloat in there!”

And I promise that future me will be a zen, chill, loving person. Or a dick, life is crazy, you never know how it’ll go.

On Mint, it’s rare and only when I try and do something that isn’t already packed up as an app. I might go weeks without using it, then use it all day for a few days.

A few weeks ago I dealt with my deceased Grandfather’s computer. He passed 12 years ago and once Grandma passed, there was no reason left to shrine it all off. He was a prolific artist. Played the piano, French horn and oboe. Painted, did etchings and lithographs, drawings.

He filled up the HDD on his first PC, a 2006 Dell Optima IIRC, and was on his way to filling up a spool of CD-RWs and his 2010 Dell Inspirion when he passed. Pulled the hard drives and connected them to pull what was on there. One part the mind of an artist - folders of 200 pics of clouds and rocks and mountains, paintings and works from the 60’s and 70’s propped up in the front yard (great light!), random pictures of cacti. Then, the mind of a grandparent - my cousins as babies, my youngest aunt younger than I am now writing this, baseball games and holidays. Most taken a decade closer to Gene Ziegler’s words than today. Saved and copied and backed up and copied again and uploaded for one more incarnation.

you may as well reboot and go out with a bang

I’ll get downvoted for this, but use Claude for Linux troubleshooting, not ChatGPT. It’s much better at both Linux and PC troubleshooting. Also, are you sure that your refurbishments are compatible with the board and remaining components? Might be worth trying to do a Windows 10 install (don’t actually install, just go through the steps) just to see if you get a GUI from that process.

Also, check and take this to LinuxMintForums.com as that’s more specialized. But try and get more info before you go over there. They’ll want full details.

“I’m 16, but in base 1, I’m 10000000000000000 years old. My ID just needs to be updated.”

So should I be saying base 9+1?