I have an old mac mini that was a server for a good 4-ish years.

The good:

1. They are pretty good at sticking in a closet and forgetting about them.
2. Specs are always on the decent side and some of the older models are easy to upgrade.
3. Power is ok. It sips power
4. It can run for years without issues. I still have two mac minis I used for CI/CD jobs, thin clients, etc…
5. Its a cheap mac. If you need mac for something, like building custom mac specific applications, then its a decent little machine.

The bad:

1. CPU is usually lacking compared to any computer of the same price range.
2. MAC OS. Its good at desktop but as a server, it just doesn’t have the same options/ease of use as a good linux box. You can get around that by dual booting, but its just another headache. Docker/VMs are also an option, but the RAM/CPU usage would take a hit.
3. The newer the model, the harder it is to upgrade.

I would use it as a specialty server if you have something you do automatically only macs can do. Or as a thin client/vm box.

I used to use it as a CI/CD box before github actions was a thing. If you happen to have one, sure set it up for fun. If you dont and are looking at buying one, I would suggest a cheap dell desktop or (depending on what you want to host) a pi 5 or thin client and throw linux on it.

It works I’m assuming if you use gog/itch or maintain your own library. I have a couple of drives that do something similar without the UI.

Appreciate the response. I use docker/docker compose at work. I just don’t like maintaining it.

Any way to get it working with yunohost? It’s basically an all in one self hosting platform that has installable plugins.

Quick q what are you using to host your podcast site? I went and followed on Mastodon, since that works best for personal lists for me.

I like Linux and I like the idea of prepping (or sometimes making fun of it) so I think this should be good.

Some services Ive been looking at:

• Cheapest seems to be namecheaps own offerings: https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email/
• Proton mail seems to be good, but I would have to pay extra for the Thunderbird integration by the look of things.

I have one running on the equivalent of a pi. It works no problem. The biggest issue is the constant io and network traffic but it’s not terrible.

I wish there was a only poll once every x amount of time instead of the constant polling, but it’s a good solution. I use lemmy.world as the main account and the other account when I need to post under my real name with some projects I run. Plus it makes for a good development instance since I work on lemmy from time to time

Yeah it’s much better now. Things have mostly settled. It was more of a knee jerk reaction tbh. But it did get more people interested/exposed to Linux for dev machines. Which I think is good for the long run.

We need good options as devs. Mac/Linux are still my gotos for that reason.

I agree quite a bit. One thing to note is ever since the m1-3 chips and breakage with brew, my local circle is going other machines. I know brew eventually fixed things but some packages never got updated/broke permanently.

Maybe they disable tracking because Internet is a premium up there?

For me my self hosted version stopped working. From what the GitHub issues are saying, Google is starting to block instances if they get flagged.

It sucks…and seems to be catching on. Ive seen a quite a few on GitHub that are now referencing using it instead of the issue tracker.

Same with me. I played around with the setup a few times on my local machines. It took quite a bit to get it set up, then I saw an error after a couple of days and gave up. Its easier to just pull down the file and run it locally than use collabora.

More recently its go to discord for the env…no joke.

Nice. I’m all about new providers

Welp I’m an anonymous person on the Internet so you can believe what you want. I could say that my job is literally mass deploying servers (devops) but if you don’t believe me that I said that I read it then I’m not sure what we can agree on.

Let’s just stop while we are both ahead. It’s a Thursday, good day for coffee yeah? Hope you have a good day.

How is Hetzner?

Just about but it’s more experimental.

It appears after the controversy they removed the parts https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/after-overreaching-tos-angers-users-cloud-provider-vultr-backs-off/

But when I read the tos, it was pretty clear it was not limited.

You also had to agree without an opt out which was scammy. There are better providers out there.

Nope. It’s the content.