Honestly I think they are all weighted the same, or at least pretty damn close.

This came up in my Youtube feed, and didn't realize it's already been 10 years (& change). Still a great song, and dare I say a bit nostalgic. Hope this isn't breaking any rules, as it does contain language (Rule 1?).

EDIT 5: Well damn, I forgot to update this with my final choice, and it's been suiting me well so far. I ended up dropping a little bit more and picked up the Bosgame P4 for roughly $285. It's been amazing so far. Running Proxmox on it with 3 VMs: HA, Jellyfin, and Pihole. All of them work great and it's been nothing but stable since I got everything running. I never knew how much a leap it was for my Pihole, it used to take 5-10 minutes to update gravity on the Pi Zero W, now it's less than 10 seconds! Jellyfin is rock solid, and I have my existing NAS SMBed to Proxmox so it can be accessed from any VM. HA is a joy as well, and I was able to restore my settings from the previous install on the Pi4. All around great choice, ad I still have headoom for a number of other VMs if needed. I've been dabbling into the *arr Suite on the Proxmox VE Helper Scripts and whileI'm not in high need of sailing too much, it's neat to have so many options at my disposal.

Thanks to all who assisted me in this setup!

EDIT 4: I almost gave up on finding the "holy grail" for my use-case. Right price, right specs, etc., and while it's not perfect, I think I found a solid balance for all. Despite most of the reviews being for a free product, they were well written enough to goad me to purchase. I ended up with the Morefine M9S N305 Mini PC. I grabbed the variant that was still 16GB DDR5, but skimped out of the m.2 size at 256 vs 512. I don't think I'll need 512GB for my application. I also went with an older but more powerful Alder Lake i3 n305 vs the flooded market of Twin Lake n150 procs. I would like to think the extra headroom and core count will prove useful with running 3+ VMs. In the meantime, I've been slowly tinkering with a VM of Proxmox (VMception?) so see how i performs. I've not gotten far with it yet :P

EDIT 3: And Amazon decided to wait until the last minute to cancel my order as it was OOS. Would've been nice if they told me sooner. The unit is now also $60 more than before. GREAT.

EDIT 2: I’ve chosen the Beelink EQ14. It had the best “last-gen” specs, lowest price, and better hardware (BT 5.2 vs Pulcro’s 4.2, as well as Wifi6 vs Wifi5). I also ruled out the Morefine because all of its reviews were paid, not very reassuring imho.

EDIT: Holy shit, was not expecting so much support for my inquiry. Thank you all for the bevy of ideas and solutions. I think I'm still gonna go for the Intel 12th Gen+ NUC style, although some of your setups seriously made me quite jelly. Maybe I'll get there one of these days. I'll update this when I finally lock down my purchase :)

Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because I've started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope it's simple). For the past couple years I've been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. I've also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in RAID0 RAID1, which is about half full atm. I'm not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so I've pivoted to an attempt at combining the 3 Pis above into one NUC/SFF/etc device with a roughly similar power draw. Also looking at re-jumping back into 3D printing using OctoPrint.

I've looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerling's article/video on Pi vs. NUC. I've continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only because... it's all I know. I'd like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as I'm a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as I've primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. I'd like to try staying with AMD as I've slowly moved over from the "dark side" (don't hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.

Last nugget is that I've never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. I've new-ish to VMs too, so anything "Baby's First VM" would be nice.

I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if there's no magical unicorn, I'm cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and I'm really keen on seeing what options I have.

___

Really wasn't expecting to post again in this community about negative situations again, but our newest addition just left us after only two weeks. FIV absolutely fucking sucks. She was just shy of five months old.

As consolation, here's my cat tax.

Wolfgang

Riley

Phil

This was Sweets, aka Sweets Petites From the Streets Who Eats Treats, aka Sweetie. We sent her over the rainbow bridge this past Monday, as she was in a losing battle with tongue cancer. We gave her the best life we could. It feels like the world was always stacked against her, but she was a fighter. She had the voice of an elderly smoker, and she was part of our little framily.

She will be missed. We're in the process of setting up a tiny shrine for her ashes, as well as a bit of jewelry to keep her with us at all times.