Dust is going to be a problem (well, maybe not that much electrically, but it maks it a pita to keep clean) after some months, especially for the Raspberry Pi.

Consider getting (or, even better, 3D printing) an enclosure for it at least (maybe the HDDs will be fine as they are since the fan keeps the air moving and dust probably can’t actually settle down on it).

After an update and having been a while since I played it, I was running a nice solo session of 7 Days To Die offline on my machine and get some wierd message.

Turned out the thing wasn’t offline and, worse, it defaults to online public server with no password no nothing, and somebody had joined my session and blew up my base when I was away from it. They kept trying to chat to me afterwards - can only guess they wanted to gloat, and didn’t see the point of enhancing their experience by giving them them that - but I just stopped the game, searched around, found that the thing had defaulted to online public and switched it off.

Handled the whole thing like as if it was some kind of random challenge the game had thrown my way so I had to rebuilt my base (one of the core game mechanics is that every 7 ways the game throws a massive monster attack at you) just in time for the next attack, which I succeeded in doing, so ultimatelly I turned that person’s attempt at griefing into more fun for me, though in the few minutes in my game they destroyed hours of me building the original base.

Anyways, wtf stupid decision from the gamedevs was that to silently default a game which is just fine solo offline, to public online. Have those people never played anything online and have no concept of griefing?!

The corporate greed and the terrorist being in power are also related things.

External 2.5" HDDs connected via USB for longer term bulk storage and using it as a NAS, a smaller internal NVME SSD for the OS and a larger one (but SATA, so slower) for the directory were torrents go to.

The different drive performances fit my usage pattern just fine whilst optimizing price per GB.

External 3.5" would be cheaper for bulk storage but the 2.5" are a leftover from when I was more constrained in terms of physical space.

Well, the N100 does have a lot more breathing space in terms of computing power, so it’s maybe a better bet for something you want to use for a decade or more, and that remote control I linked to above does work fine, except for the power button (which will power your Linux off but won’t power it back on).

I actually tried an Android TV Box (which is really just and SBC in the same range of processing power as the Pi) for this before going for the Mini PC and it was simply not as smooth operating.

That Mini-PC has enough computing power room (plus the right processing extensions) that I can be torrenting over OpenVPN on a 1Gb/s connection whilst watching a video from a local file and it’s not at all noticeable on the video playback.

Kodi install instructions are here

I don’t use docker, I use lubuntu with normal packages. So for example Kodi is just installed from the Team Kodi PPA repository (which, granted, is outdated, but it works fine and I don’t need the latest and greatest) and just set it up to be auto-started when X starts so that on the TV it’s as if Kodi is the interface of that machine.

Qbittorrent is just the server only package (qbittorrent-nox) which I control remotelly via its web interface and the rest is normal stuff like Samba.

After the inital set up, the actual linux management can be done remotelly via ssh.

That said, LibreELEC is a Linux distro which comes with Kodi built-in (it’s basically Kodi and just enough Linux to run it), so assuming it’s possible to install more stuff in it might be better - I only found out about it when I had my setup running so never got around to try it. LibreELEC can even work in weaker hardware such as a Raspberry Pi or some of its clones.

Also you can get Kodi as a Flatpak which works out of the box in various Linux distros so if you need the latest and greatest Kodi plus a full-blown Linux distro for other stuff you might do the choice of distro based on supporting flatpack and being reasonably lightweight (I actually originally went for Lubuntu exactly because it uses a lightweight Window Manager and I expected that N100 mini-pc to need it, though in practice the hardward can probably run a lot more heavy stuff than that, though lighter stuff means the CPU load seldom goes up significativelly hence the fan seldom turns on and so the thing is quiet most of the time and you only hear the fan spinning up and then down again once in a while even in the Summer).

As for docker, there are a lot of instructions out there on how to install Kodi with Dockers, but I never tried it.

Also you might want to get a remote like this, which is a wireless remote with a USB adapter, not because of the air-mouse thing (frankly, I never use it) but simply because the buttons are mapped to exactly the shortcuts that Kodi uses, so using it with Kodi in Linux is just like using a dedicated remote for a TV Media Box - in fact all those thinks are keyboard shortcuts (that remote just sends keypresses to the PC when you press a button) and they keyboard shortcuts for media players seem to be a standard.

It really depends on what you’re doing with it and on what old PCs you have available.

I have an N100 Mini-PC at home in my living room connected to my TV which is both a home server and a TV-Box using Kodi (I even have a remote for it).

Having modern image and video decoding in hardware is pretty useful when I’m using it as a TV Box (there is zero stutter with it), whilst the rest of the time the thing mostly sits doing some low CPU-intensive server tasks (mainly torrenting and SMB server stuff).

Also, it’s a small box that fits fine on my TV stand without standing out and runs silent pretty almost all of the time.

Further, I don’t have any low power consuming old PCs around - the best are some chunky old notebooks, the rest are old gaming PCs which eat more power idle than the mini PC does at full load - and even the notebooks aren’t that low power as all that.

Mind you, for many years I used an old Asus EEE PC (a very small notebook running Linux) as home file server (with external HDs) and had a separated dedicated hardware TV Media Server box playing files from it, but eventually that PC stopped working and I found out I could just use my Router as a file server.

Last but not least, judging for how long I kept using my TV Media Server boxes (which over almost 2 decades I had 2 different ones and which as dedicated hardware could not easilly be upgraded when new video compression standards came out) 10+ years is definitelly my time-frame for using that Mini-PC.

All this to say that you should consider using old hardware, especially if you have some around and it’s task appropriate (like I did before using an old Asus EEE PC as a home file server), but also take in account what you’re going to do it and consider if new hardware won’t be better over the timespan you will likely be using it and if the being able to get a more task appropriate form factor (like how having a little box-size Mini PC lets me have it in my living room on a TV stand next to my TV and my fiber router) is worth it.

In summary, before you get hardware you should ponder a bit about what you intend to do with it before you decide what to get, don’t be afraid of using stuff you already have and also don’t be afraid to get new stuff if it’s actually justified by hardnosed reasons rather than merely some variant of the “new stuff smell” psychological effect when buying new.

I some discussion about Nvidia somebody what complaining how they were used to 200 fps at 4K but some graphics cards couldn’t do it with raytracing on without using DLSS.

As somebody else in that thread said, it’s masturbatory fps numbers.

Well, been * ahem * told that a friend of a friend didn’t found any videos there were “Your friendly neighborhood geek goes into the house of a hot milf to upgrade her Windows 10 machine to Arch and she shows them how hot she found their Linux install skills and how thankful she is”, so that seems unlikely.

Nah, low ceilings are horrible and oppressive.

The rest is fine.

So what you’re saying is that there are more wankers on Linux nowadays!???

I’m current stuck in a long term cycle of mainly Project Zomboid, Factorio, Valheim, Oxygen Not Included, The Lone Dark and Rimworld, were when I’m fed up of playing the last of them, it’s been long enough since I played the first one that it’s once interesting to play it.

Even when I manage to be fed up with playing all of them at any one point, I still have other progression games with complex emergent gameplay (often but not always games which have algorithmically generated game areas) like Kenshi. 7 Days to Die or OpenTTD that pull me in and if that fails, I can always pick up one of the old open world roleplay jewels such as Skyrim and play that.

I’ve barelly tried anything else in the last couple of years and of those only Oxygen Not Include was the only one with any lasting power and I picked that one years ago.

It’s not even because I can’t afford it (though out of principl I refuse to pay more than €20 for a game) - whenever I try an AAA game nowadays (always games that came out years ago) it’s almost invariably an inferior experience that either feels too constrained or doesn’t have enough gameplay variety and complexity to be fun for long.

They’re like an origami figure folded wrongly that causes any properly folded origami figures to become misfolded when it comes in contact with them.

The actual driver for an HID USB device, even on WIndows, is still just a few KB.

Worse, the default driver for HID devices like mice, keyboards, joysticks, gamepads and so on is part of Windows since Windows 7 and all you had to do was give it an INF file that really just associated USB hardware devices that sent the PC a specific identifier (made up of a VID and a PID value) on USB protocol initialization, with that built-in driver - and that file is maybe 100 bytes. Even better, that INF file is not even needed anymore since Windows 10.

A driver for a mouse (pretty much the simplest Human Interface Device there is) that in addition to the normal mouse thing also supports setting the RGB color of some lights is stupidly simple because the needed functionality is already in the protocol.

Remember, modern digital electronics still uses really tiny processors sometimes with less than 32KB flash memory (and way less than that in RAM) only they’re microcontrollers rather than microprocessors now, hence the protocols are designed so that they can be handled by processing hardware with little memory (after all, many USB Hosts aren’t PCs but instead are things like USB HUDs which have microcontrollers not microprocessors)

I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that almost the entirety of that 1GB is bloatware.

Or you can use qbittorrent-nox which is a server-only package of qbittorrent and just interact with it via its the web interface from your favorite browser.

Mind you, I only know this by chance because I explicitly wanted to run qbittorrent as a service on an always on machine which is not supposed to be used with keyboard and mouse.

Theraphy, when it works, only solves internal causes of one’s pain.

29 days away from present day society, will for a while suspend the external causes of one’s pain.

(Which is why the former usually doesn’t fully solve everything: the external shit, which often is what indirectly created much of the internal shit via things like trauma and coping mechanisms, is still there and pushing you)

Best start having takeaway cups at home next time somebody comes by to install something, just in case they need to take the gift which is my offering of coffee or tea, to their bosses…

Let’s be fair: by that stage you should probably also draw some blood and leave it there.

Wouldn’t want to unwittingly be keeping from the boss the nutrients from that free meal.

The whole story just warms my heart.

Heroes definitelly don’t always wear capes!

Peace of the grave.