I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I’m genuinely amazed that it hasn’t fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
I last tried out the beta version of it on Graphene a couple of months back and it was rough. In fairness though, I was mostly using it to figure out how to use it to install a full fat Linux distro, which is probably a niche use.
My phone’s just updated, so I’ll give it another spin when I get home tonight and report back.
The performance with regards to Home Assistant is spot on.
I have an M1 mini with 8Gb of RAM that I use as my Home Assistant server. I’ve given 4Gb to HAOS running in UTM, and let Ollama use the rest to run a modest LLM for speech to text. It’s flawless.
I’m not suggesting that 8Gb is the gold standard or anything, but for some applications it’s still perfectly usable.
I have an M2 Air with 16Gb, and for what I need it to do, I couldn’t have any less, but the target market for a bargain basement entry level MacBook almost certainly won’t ever notice. It’ll literally just be a portal to access iCloud and whatever browser they use to get on their socials. And if they do find they need more, then Apple will happily sell them a new laptop.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Apple’s approach to RAM pricing has been criminal for years, and as a company they’re really figuring out how to plumb the depths of scumminess, but on this I don’t really see the issue.
With that said, the cost of an extra 8Gb to them is literally pennies, so withholding it is shitty. But it won’t really make that much difference to the average performance of the computer.
For what it’s worth, I was planning on reinstalling my home server because I put Mint on it a year ago and I kinda feel like I’ve outgrown it. So it’s now running Debian.
It obviously feels a lot more useful than Mint, but feels basically the same as my Kubuntu machine, largely because they’re both running Plasma.
Don’t use Ubuntu. It’s just a suckier version of Debian. It used to be user-friendly Debian, but now Debian is more user-friendly than it.
As a reasonably new Linux user, who’s merrily used Kubuntu for the past year, what makes Ubuntu sucky? Aside from dabbling in Asahi and a little bit of Arch, just to see why everyone loves it (I don’t think my use-case is advanced enough to really tell the difference), my only real experience with Linux has been Mint and Kubuntu, both of which have been fine for me.
This isn’t a bad-faith query, btw, I’m genuinely interested in what the actual differences are between Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora.
So…uh…welcome to our little club.
I’m still very much a Linux n00b, so am still liable to break shit if I don’t fully understand what I’m doing. So I’ve worked out that the best thing for me is to have an old laptop that doesn’t really have any other use that I can mess about with. The amount of distros I’ve put on it just to see what it does…
My current weapon for this is my 2011 MacBook Pro.
Huh, hadn’t thought of that.
Pretty much.
It reads the clipboard, adds the URL to a yt-dlp script, downloads the video, then switches to my YouTube Jellyfin folder and copies the download across. But instead of opening a terminal in that folder and copy/pasting the script from a .txt file I used to use, it’s just one click. Three if you count clicking the share button in Freetube and then clicking the ‘copy link’ button.
My approach is a python app that’s literally just a button I press after I copy a YT URL from FreeTube. I click the button and it gets yt-dlp to download the video in the highest quality into my Jellyfin folder so I can watch it on my Apple TV.
I did start looking into TubeSync, but I wasn’t all that familiar with Docker at the time, so got quite lost with it. In the end I quite like browsing FreeTube, and only downloading the stuff that catches my interest. Means I don’t spend ages idly scrolling a feed.
Those things have held their value well, largely because of the RAM. Idly pondered grabbing one when the M1 came along, but the price was still strong. Dunno what they’re like now, mind. I’d be tempted as a replacement for my 2014, but honestly, it still works just fine considering it’s only got 8GB RAM.
I find myself at a point where I don’t actually want any new computing devices, partly because of this, and partly because, well, what I have works fine for me.
I have an M2 MacBook Air that is still as solid as the day I got it (Sequoia for life) for the majority of my personal needs, plus a 2014 Mac mini running Mint as my home server, an M1 Mac Mini my dad gave me that runs my Home Assistant, and an old(er) PC that has a GTX 1060 GPU that’s capable of playing most of the games I care to play. My phone is a Pixel 9 running Graphene which is a year old and nowhere needing a replacement, and I have an iPad mini that I barely use these days anyway.
I guess I’m lucky enough that my shit is new enough that it’s still usable, and my use-case is light enough on resources that the older gear still works perfectly well for what I need.
My wife, however, needs a new PC…
I actually have no idea how it all works. It just does.
Asahi is incredible for general use computing on M1/2 machines, and perhaps even in use as a general purpose home server. But it’s still very much a fun exercise in what might be possible rather than a solid option, in my opinion.