Everyone else has described the complications that a Mac mini would have. So why not consider something else? Lenovo, HP, and Dell make 1l ultra small form factor PCs and they’re pretty cheap on eBay. They’re also low power. Search for Tiny Mini Micro to find information.

I have three Lenovo Thinkcentre machines - two with 32gb RAM and one with 64gb RAM - running my Proxmox VE cluster. Highly recommend using those small machines instead of a Mac mini.

Don’t use YouTube to MP3, use one of the Deemix variants that downloads music straight from Deezer’s servers.

We use Slack for those of us on the IT team, but Teams for everyone else. I despise Teams.

Kurt Cobain has probably been gone longer than these people have been alive.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If purchasing something doesn’t mean you own it, then piracy isn’t theft.

Risking sounding like a broken record, I always suggest Tiny/Mini/Micro 1L form factor office PCs. Lenovo, Dell, and HP all create ultra small office PCs that make great low power servers. A Pi will use 5-9w at idle, while these PCs will use 11-13w idle. They also use more standard components such as NVME drives, 2.5" drives, and replaceable RAM. Easy to find under $100 USD used, I’m sure you can find them under 100 euro.

Looks like the character just rotates their upper body.

Look up 1L mini PCs - Dell, Lenovo, and HP have similar one liter mini PCs that would’ve been used as a lightweight frontend in offices. They are easy to find on eBay and can be pretty cheap.

For example, my lab at home consists of three Lenovo Thinkcentre tiny machines. I bought them off eBay for $60-80 USD. They each came with a 500gb HDD and 8gb RAM. I have since upgraded them all to a 500gb NVME, 500gb SSD (they have a 2.5" drive bay), and 32gb of RAM. They run as a Proxmox VE cluster.

I think I might have $500 USD into the entire setup, including my 10" wide rack enclosure.

Jet Set Radio

Oh no, guess the people using Windows at home will have to just settle for using the easily found Microsoft Activation Scripts!

I totally missed that you have an uncontainerized service. Can you run the service directly on the hardware host (safely)? If so, here’s how I would probably run it considering your memory constraints:

1. Install Debian
2. Set up the uncontainerized service directly on the host.
3. Install Docker directly on the host as well.
4. Spin up the containers for everything else.

Not the cleanest/most separated answer but it would reduce the memory load of additional layers of host/VM/containers. If this isn’t storing any sensitive data or being directly exposed to the internet that should be fine.

If you are dealing with sensitive data or exposing to the internet, I would consider your original plan of Proxmox VMs to separate everything but see if you can add additional RAM to help. Also consider installing something like fail2ban on every host and VM.

The containers in Proxmox (LXC Containers) are a little different from Docker containers. You can’t deploy Docker containers directly as LXC containers. You can, however, run an LXC container and install Docker on it, then run Docker containers there.

In your scenario I don’t think I’d use Proxmox as you’re going to run into issues with lack of RAM. I think you’re going to have issues running out of memory either way though. Running the whole machine as a Docker node would probably be more memory-efficient than having the overhead of running separate VMs under Proxmox.

NGINX should run fine as a container. There’s even an official build available on Docker Hub.

Speaking from experience here. I’ve done this on over a dozen different computers with zero issues over a three month span. It was part of a proposal for transitioning our company computers to Windows 11 while cutting out the junk. None of them had any problems running without Xbox services, Cortana, bloatware games, activity tracking, etc.

We ended up using Microsoft Intune for restricting Windows 10/11 to our standards. But that’s not really available for consumers and debloaters are safe to use instead.

Not new to Linux, it’s literally what I’ve been dealing with for work for the last decade. I just meant that I moved the last of my personal machines away from Windows.

I have run into zero issues installing packages from other places. The snap store is a bit annoying but not a big deal. I’ve been on and off using Ubuntu since ~2005 so that’s why I went with it over another distro.

If it’s your own machine, I recommend running one of the Windows 11 debloaters.

I’ve moved all of my personal machines over to Linux (specifically Ubuntu). Windows just isn’t worth it anymore.

This is the first time I’ve heard of this, thanks! Looks like a good addition to my homelab.