Fixed link

I see they’re promoting something called the Helium network. What’s the relationship between that and Meshtastic? Are they completely different things?

Your posts are a bit confusing to read because you don’t capitalize Windows To Go. Capitalizing it would make it easier to understand.

I’d use a Kill-a-Watt or similar to check how much power it uses, before deciding whether it’s worth installing anything on it. Also check how much noise it makes, unless you have a separate room for servers. Enterprise servers aren’t always a good fit for home use.

Mint or Fedora would be my first choices. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for my own computers but I think those others are better for people new to Linux. In my experience Fedora does a good job of combining up-to-dateness and stability. Mint is less up to date, but close enough to Ubuntu and Debian that loads of the help materials out there will apply to it.

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They’re offering a helpful guide so others don’t have to spend ages figuring it out for themselves. There’s no need to react so negatively.

Yes, I think that’s reasonable. The midrange CPU in the Beelink you linked is already significantly more capable than the Intel N150 etc., though it has a TDP of 15W compared to the N150’s 6W. I haven’t dug into which specialized features they support (hardware codec support etc.) but for a general-purpose computer I’d definitely prefer the one you linked to those N100/N150 minis, even if it uses a little more power. Others might have a different opinion but that would be my choice.

I’ve found that you don’t need to go that far above the $200 cost of an Intel N100/150 system to get a mini PC with a significantly more powerful AMD processor. It won’t be the latest generation but it will be capable of a lot more than those low-power Intels, and from my measurements many AMD processors of the last three generations or so are good at saving power when they’re idle, so it won’t use a ton more electricity. Sometimes you find used ones on eBay at a decent price because someone upgraded.

I’ve not noticed Cinnamon being any faster than KDE. I’d recommend KDE for someone coming from Windows.

I like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed: everything’s up to date and it’s very stable for a rolling distro. Very occasionally an update is problematic but there are easy rollbacks thanks to btrfs. KDE Plasma is an easy desktop environment for a former Windows user too. One weirdness is you’ll have to get used to using the command line to update native packages and Flatpaks (“sudo zypper dup” and “sudo flatpak update”), because the GUI updater apparently isn’t really intended for the rolling distro.

Went there to update my password but got reminded what a horrible experience Plex is these days, so deleted my account instead.

I’ve had good luck with Antix on very old machines.

I’ve moved Linux SSDs (not Debian) between disparate machines a number of times and it has always just worked. There’s a good chance Debian will just run too.

Bony eared assfish

Bill Gates’s wealth is listed as about $118 billion. Steve Wozniak says his is “maybe $10 million plus a couple of homes,” so perhaps $20m if they’re very fancy homes. This makes Bill Gates about $117,980,000,000 richer than Steve Wozniak - a completely different category of wealth. I’m sure there are plenty of asshole millionaires but asshole billionaires are immeasurably more dangerous. Woz couldn’t play the Bill Gates kinds games with his money even if he wanted to.

Anyway, I consider myself pretty left, and pretty pro-workers owning the means of production, but I think we should be going after the billionaires first, and not wasting our time on millionaires unless they’re doing something unusually bad.

There are loads of cheap Chinese mini-PCs based on Intel N95, N100 or N150, and they’d make the job easier than a phone or a Raspberry Pi. Spend a little more and you can get some pretty cheap AMD Ryzen-based models with much more capable CPUs.

Why do so many computer manufacturers organize their websites around obscure names of model ranges that only they understand, or make you decide upfront whether you want a “home” or “business” or “creator” laptop? Why do they all make it as difficult as possible for you to browse what’s on offer? Is it just because they all suck at website design, or is there some other reason?

You don’t get the same feeling of suspicion about what the machine is up to. Windows 11 feels like the computer spends just enough time doing what you want that you don’t walk away forever in frustration, but most of the resources are spent doing unspecified things in the background for people you don’t know, who are very interested in what you’re doing. My Windows XP machine’s CPU scores 75 on Passmark, while my Windows 11 machine scores about 46,000. But the speed at which they do many ordinary things isn’t so different, because Windows 11 does so much heavy stuff in the background. My Linux machines (scoring between 8,000 and 28,000) all feel tangibly faster than Win 11.

I ran mine like this for years. Then a few weeks ago I installed Immich so we can browse photos directly from the NAS on our phone. That’s how it will stay. I don’t want it to turn into an application server.