You son of a bitch, I’m in.

I’ve become a big fan of mini PC’s for home server use these days (with NAS systems for storage duties). Low power, low heat, low noise, and very affordable.

Beelink on Amazon makes a good selection of them. Always watch for sales. I have several of their machines and have been pleasantly surprised by all of them. The latest addition was one of their N95 systems with 8GB of memory. It hosts Jellyfin, Deluge, Wireguard (client and server), dns, forgejo, etc.

There hasn’t been a packaged release in a while. The repo updated last week, though. Not everything needs a high release cadence.

The most common alternative is probably Bottles

Reasons are usually just newest kernel/mesa/etc. Most of the time the difference is very small, and often inconsequential. However, every now and again there is a major development that might make it worth it (IE: The graphics pipeline that all but made dxvk-async obsolete)

I see you all over this thread and I want to share something you might find interesting.

You keep mentioning the server can’t handle the anti cheat because it needs to trust client data. Here’s an interesting thought: how is client anti cheat supposed to work when it needs to trust input data?

Look up direct memory access cheats. TL;DR Two computers are hooked up such that PC 1 runs the game, PC 2 reads memory from PC 1, and can then output keyboard/mouse inputs, as well as wallhacks/esp. How is the client side anti cheat supposed to know that the keyboard and mouse inputs are legitimate? How is the client side anti cheat to know wallhacks are being used when they are being rendered on an entirely different machine?

The plugins would almost certainly work in a VM, but I imagine that latency would become a big headache. For my purposes, I picked up a Beelink mini pc and called it a day.

So in terms of DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), Linux already has Bitwig, Reaper, Arour, LMMS, and possibly others. Personally, I find the bigger issue comes from plugin developers (the DAW is your main program, and you add your sounds/effects through plugins). Most companies are not delivering anything Linux native. Many of these plugins can be bridged with compatibility software, and will work fine that way. However, most of these plugins now are also using their own install/activation software center, and they are often a nightmare in Linux.

Music production is the one thing I currently keep a windows mini PC around for these days. It’s not impossible to make the transition to Linux, but the last thing I want when pursuing a creative endeavor is technical software challenges holding me up.

90% sure wireguard (the VPN server) is going to need an open port if you want to connect from the outside.

Lots of people, often unknowingly. If you run apt install firefox on Ubuntu, you’re getting the snap version.

FWIW: I’m running jellyfin and a whole host of other services on a Beelink with an Intel n95 and 8gb of ram. Runs like a champ.

Maui has zero Linux support. I don’t believe there are any plans for it, either.

However, Avalonia is fully supported, and is almost a drop in replacement for WPF.

We are all tired on this day.

Using Firefox mobile, everything works and is mostly performance 🤷‍♂️

The OP ruled out zig and rust already

Right, that’s what I meant when I said “third party apps”. Samsung can write an app to do this, but your average app installed from the play store likely cannot.

I’m not super well versed in the world of app development, but I would assume due to the way apps are sandboxed, this isn’t something that could be done with a third party app.

im a big fan of the nas device being single purpose. its life should only exist in fileserving. i have several redundant nas devices and then a big ol app server.

This is the way. Except my “big ol’ app server” is an n95 mini pc that sips power.

Because even if an attacker could gain access even as root he cannot modify system files.

Your comment was already from the position of if an attacker could gain root access. My responses were to that directly, and nothing else.

Your comment also contained

The filesystem itself is also read-only.

Which is what led to the further discussion of root making that not so.

I don’t believe that to be the intent of the OP’s comment, given their second sentence, but they are welcome to state otherwise. I just don’t want them thinking that an immutable distribution gives them some kind of bulletproof security that it doesn’t.

While you are correct, any system is compromised if you have root, so isn’t that irrelevant at that point?

The original context for the comment chain was:

Because even if an attacker could gain access even as root he cannot modify system files.

So no, it’s completely relevant.