2018 Mac Mini
I've come into a 2018 Intel Mac Mini, its got an i7 and I've upgraded it to 32gb of RAM. I feel pretty constrained on MacOS as I mostly just game. How function are eGPUs under Linux? I'm pretty comfortable on Linux, its what I use on desktop daily. But I've never tried anything with external graphics on it. Xorg seems like it could be a mess with config files, is Wayland any better?
No experience with egu on them. But they are phenomenal linux boxes. Ive got 5 running my homelab with those exact specs. Stick an ssd in there and golden. Its a bot of a pita but not hard.
Otherwise (i do this on one of them) boot off an external thunderbolt ssd
Nice, I’ve also thought of installing PFsense on it and using it as my home router. But that seems like kind of waste of its potential. It’s perfectly sized for that purpose though.
I’d recommend getting a tiny/1L Dell/HP/Lenovo box and sticking an enterprise grade dual-port NIC from eBay in it instead, if you want a custom router. Mac minis from that production run came with gigabit, and you had to specifically option a 10G NIC (read: they’re harder to find and generally more expensive), and even then you only get a single port.
I'll check it out, I do have something on hand though that I'm thinking of going with. As any self respecting "computer guy" I have waaay too many towers around the house and am right now planning to try to use an optiplex 5040 MT as a proxmox box running a pfsense VM and maybe some storage too.
EDIT: Fixed some typos/grammar
I’ve got one running in a Proxmox cluster. Getting it setup was a bit particular (due to the T2 chip if I remember correctly), but it’s be working flawlessly. I use the quick sync feature of the iGPU for my jellyfin container.
If you were going to buy something new, I think there are more cost effective boxes of about the same size and spec, but if you’ve got it already, you should definitely start playing with it.