Thanks for that list. No need here for more advanced hardware so I’ll have to put off networking upgrades until I can come up with a reason to justify it.

As a home user, what additional features have you found useful on enterprise networking equipment? Just because what I’m doing is already ridiculously complex doesn’t mean it can’t be more so.

OpenWRT is amazingly flexible and would be a great place to start.

I switched from DD-WRT last year and have been amazed how good OpenWRT is. There are thousands of software packages that allow you to do pretty much anything you can think of on inexpensive hardware. Used Netgear R7800s are available for less than $50 on ebay or there are plenty of newer hardware options if you want to spend more. Those thousands of downloadable software packages include Wireguard and Adguard Home, plus there are OpenWRT integrations for Home Assistant. The forum is full of people who are happy to help newcomers.

I started by running OpenWRT in a virtual machine to get familiar with the UI and moved on to a live installation. Highly recommended, especially if you enjoy learning.

On my Linux Mint laptop Winboat installed quickly and allowed me to install and run the one program I use that requires Windows. This biggest issues were with that same app’s windows when they were rendered on the Linux desktop. They sometimes couldn’t be moved, resized or closed, however the same app ran just fine on the Winboat Windows Desktop itself.

The latest version is identified as an alpha release on the UI, so these problems aren’t surprising. What is surprising is how well so much of this works for an alpha release, particularly how polished the installation process is.

Looking forward to using Winboat when it progresses to the beta.

4gb isn’t much ram, but it can be surprisingly useful if you configure Zswap. Lots of guides out there. Here’s one of them.

What are those alternatives? I can’t think of any that are ready for prime time.

I didn’t figure it out either. It was a educated guess and I got lucky.

I had similar issues with Home Assistant initially and had two failures that looked like database corruption in less than 6 months. I decided to give it one last try and switched to MariaDB. That was nearly 3 years ago. Since then it’s been rock solid.

You had a lucky escape, HA is addictive.

Not everyone cares enough to avoid Google. Some of us that want to do so are related to them.

You can stop using all Google products.

That may be true for you, but other people face different realities. When Google implements the sideloading block it will eventually be pushed to everyone who doesn’t use a custom ROM.

The infuriating part of the Google enshittification process is that there is absolutely nothing the user can do about it.

Literally the only thing that motivates Google is profit. Controlling side-loaded apps will almost certainly boost their profits by a infinitesimal fraction of a percent, therefore it will be done. Even if consumer uproar causes Google to back down in the short term, they’ll simply implement this a few months later. Late-stage Capitalism sucks.

I have a Surface Laptop 4 and have been running Mint exclusively for a couple of years. It’s less well supported than the tablets and the initial installation took a bit of work, but once installed it has worked perfectly. The Linux Surface project has a detailed feature matrix that shows what’s supported for each model.

A single Opteron 6272 is somewhat faster than the N200, but the Opteron’s TDP is 115 watts while the N200’s is only 6 watts. OP’s server with 2 processors is more than 2x as fast as my single processor laptop, but can require nearly 40x the electricity. For a home server it’s major overkill.

Sounds like my laptop will be plenty fast for some time to come.

This platform doesn’t use much power to begin with, but I do run TLP using a battery profile despite the fact it’s always plugged in. My intent is to lower the power consumption a bit further and extend battery run time if the AC fails. There’s no noticeable impact on application performance. If you’re running Linux maybe it will work on your hardware.

Tangential question: What kind of server apps require that kind of processing power? I run a server on an Intel N200 laptop with multiple apps and services and it rarely uses more than 12% CPU and 15 watts. I’m wondering if I’m going to eventually run into something that needs a more powerful platform.