Back in the day I was running GLTron on an Athlon 1800+ w/Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (I think?) and I was running dual monitors. GLTron didn’t like using both screens since it presented as a peculiar resolution. So I emailed the GLTron dude and he quickly emailed me a patch that let me run the game across both monitors (bezels not an issue because I was doing multiplayer split screen).

What a great game.

Is this useful?

https://github.com/rodlie/powerkit

Not affiliated and haven’t used it, but its tagline of “Desktop Independent Power Manager” seems like it fits the bill.

I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.

Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding — so it presumably won’t draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I’m guessing it’s ballpark accurate.

Works flawlessly for Immich of course.

The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.

For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!

Immich! It’s an amazing self hosted Google Photos replacement.

Zigbee definitely fun with HomeAssistant. I have an SLZB-06M adapter which has PoE (important for me) and is a fairly “open” product (don’t need to jump through hoops to flash firmware). I read somewhere that it may offer Thread support at some point but wouldn’t count on that.

Not a lawyer; would this likely stand up in court? Obviously I wouldn’t risk it were I the dev, but just curious.

It’s pathetic that I’ll happily recommend my Emporia Vue2 energy monitor to folks running HA — not because it works out of the box, but because the company is aware of the community integration projects and seems ok with it, even if they don’t actually support it. (ESPHome Firmware flash gives you local control — It’s been pretty great!)

We love package managers though!

Most Linux users like the benefits of having a single command/interface to search for, install, and update software. The problem is when the source(s) for those programs is locked down.

Does budget include storage? Tight budget without storage, even tighter with…

If power usage not a concern then used x86/x64 gear is probably the way to go. Surplus gear (corporate, university…) possibly an option for you. That’s a very tight budget though, so I don’t think it really gives you the luxury of choosing specs unfortunately. That said: I might go fot the best bones/least RAM/storage if you think you might upgrade it down the road. 4GB RAM with an upgrade path to 32 is preferable to 8GB non-upgradable IMHO. Likewise, 500GB spinny disk with extra bays and an NVME slot is nicer than 500GB SSD with no upgrade path. Again… really tight budget so this may all be out of the question.

I’m a fan of low power gear, so I’d recommend something like a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB, or another SBC (I just grabbed an Orange Pi 5 Plus and I like it so far — NVME, 16GB RAM, dual NIC). However these will be out of your budget, especially once you add case, power supply, and storage.

Good luck!

Debian got me through grad school.

Not the latest and greatest (if you run stable), but if you need the latest e.g. Julia, it’s not too bad to compile it.

Big difference for me between the RPi 5 and orange pi 5 Plus is more RAM and m.2 NVME support on board. It also has four additional efficiency cores and dual 2.5G NICs, but that’s less important to me.

Downside is it has a less polished ecosystem.

Overall though I’ve been happy! But I also love my collection of raspberry pis, so it’s a matter of taste I guess.

I think this is hard to answer because there’s no “one way” to do this.

Do you want it accessible only in your house, and you’re running something like a raspberry pi? That’s one set of instructions.

Do you want it accessible from anywhere in the world, with proper TLS? That’s a little more complicated, and there are a million ways to do this — do you want to self host and expose public IP? Self host using a VPN as the entry point? Host on a VPS?

I would recommend playing around with it first. This is easiest if you can get a well-supported environment, so something like a raspberry pi is best IMHO if you want to play around with minimal frustration.

It really is. I absolutely love the shared link functionality, with the ability to easily set an expiration date and manage existing shared links.

It’s made taking pictures a lot more fun for me.

How many photos? It’s a very good user experience for me, with 123GB library (23k+ photos, 1k+ videos). Fairly entry-level Samsung phone and iPhone 13, both work great.

Running on an Orange Pi 5 Plus.

Absolutely love Immich. Was previously running on an RPi 4 w/4GB RAM, but with the other services I had on there I needed to disable ML. Orange Pi 5 Plus (16GB RAM) and it’s just a dream. Kicked off ML/facial recognition before bed and it was done in the morning. Migration from RPi to OPi was straightforward.

I think the 1st-party device support is a little trickier on Linux than on Windows, which IMHO hampers the widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop.

The reason it’s trickier is that the Linux kernel has no stable API or ABI — which is ultimately a good thing ( https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/stable-api-nonsense.rst ), but for closed source drivers presents a problem.

Oracle. Philosophical issues aside I’ve been happy, and can’t beat the price. Bandwidth is pretty limited, but that’s not a huge problem for me right now.

+1 for the Oracle solution. I use one for my public IP, and port forward over WireGuard to my home. They claim something like 480Mbps, but it’s nowhere near that, at least for external traffic. But in any event I’ve been using it for a few months with no real complaints.

And yes, I fully appreciate the irony of trying to self-host services to get away from big corporations, but relying on Oracle to do so.

Cool! I just got an Orange Pi 5 Plus, 16GB RAM**, but haven’t set it up yet so can’t give any recommendations. On paper though it looks great — significantly beefier than a RPi 4 (my current server), and supports M.2 NVME as well. Might be worth looking into for your use too, but the emphasis here is kinda on computing with a very low power budget, so I’m sure you could get more horsepower with e.g. an x64 NUC or similar.

Here’s a review, and note that this is without extra heatsink so it was probably thermally throttling (as was the RPi?): https://www.phoronix.com/review/orange-pi-5

**I first ordered the 32GB version but it got seized for counterfeit postage, and then some shenanigans ensued. If buying from Amazon I would suggest only buying units in stock and shipped from Amazon. May only apply to US though…

How much do you care about power/energy usage?

Also, how important is having one do-it-all server vs. a few separate servers? Sounds like you’re ok with at least two servers (Pi turns into HA OS, and you get a new one for everything else).

I did that — free VPS w/public IP, WG to my router. Works great!

Never used TailScale but I know it’s WireGuard based. Does it do keepalive by default? I was having issues with VPS (WireGuard peer with static IP) not being able to ping my network (router as WireGuard peer with dynamic IP and no port forwards). Sounds like this isn’t what’s going on here but just in case…

Thanks! So, for local (not VPN) traffic I like to access the local IP for bandwidth reasons — would you then just set up SSL on both the local server and the VPS?