I use old Mac Minis that were cycled out from a company and replaced. An e-waste laptop is still probably cheaper, but you can still find the older model Mac Minis fairly cheap too. I have 2 of them that sit vertically side-by-side in a small rack with my router stationed above them. They both run Elementary OS.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Some are talking about power consumption in this thread and I've had similar ideas. Gone are the days where I can run a beefy spec'd desktop in good conscience, it's just such a resource hog. I have a laptop that stays in hibernate mostly. My other idea for a low power consumption home computer was to get a Le Potato single board and pair that with an e-ink monitor (there's some really nice ones out there) which I think was sitting at maaaaybe ~5kwh. I think the more we can limit our power consumption, the better, all that electricty directy translates into coal being burned and additional CO2 being created. I'm no luddite, but it has impacted how I consume media which is now very mindful of the impact watching a few episodes/playing a couple hours of games versus just one or two hours of content on any given day.
the 20 year old pc of my grandparents had a graphics card failure, i fixed it but tgey decided i should keep the pc and help them pick a new one (valid after 20 years ngl) now this PC runs debian and hosts my game servers and all
Too late...
I personally needed the Pi for its Arm architecture.
I bought a dell latitude on eBay for a few bucks and run Debian on it. This one speaks to me.
Or any compact pc like gigabyte brix, nucs, lenovos , etc. you can get those for 70-200 on ebay and they are amazing for running any homelab projects, including stream services like jellyfin with hardware decoding.
I always prefer getting an Hp 600 g5 for $100 off eBay, you get a Intel 9500, can go to 64gb of ram, and idle at a few watts
Depending on the specs, I might be paying more for those, even used, than a SBC. The joys of Brazilian tech markets...