@neil I bought a used/refurbished ThinkCenter box with 16GB Ram on eBay a few months ago when computers were still a bit affordable. Works flawlessly with Debian. No fiddling necessary and without the hassle of a Raspberry Pi or so. Small-ish form factor

@neil haven't checked, that might be the one problem if you buy refurbished. Otoh question is how many significant firmware bugs are left.

I liked the option cause those are business machines so they did get a lot of work in their lifetime. I specifically bought an oldish version cause I don't need the fancy new stuff but YMMV of course

@neil The firmware updates requirement will really limit options.

@neil

I've been using a mini PC as my home router for a little while, it's a BosGame brand with an N100 CPU, 16GB RAM and an acceptable SSD for storage, and two wired Ethernet ports. You can find similar ones with different specs. I've used Beelink ones as media PCs too and they advertise Windows but they run Linux nicely.

For my NAS I went more home built, a CWWK motherboard (N150) in a small NAS case with 5 HDD bays. Works great too.

@neil

have good luck with raspberry pi but have also used tinkerboard and orange pi in the past. they were ok but pi is a more mature ecosystem.

@waltbaldwin

But Pi is Arm rather than AMD64. That's why it draws so little power.

@neil

@CppGuy @waltbaldwin @neil yeah, which left me with the obvious question “why AMD64”? I would presume most of what Neil wants to run is either available in armbian or trivial to rebuild?

@neil I admit I haven't checked in a while, I can look into it.

What are you worried about with regards to firmware updates? New vulnerabilities getting fixed?

@neil

How curious… my device (Framework Laptop 13 _AMD Ryzen 7040Series_) gets regular OEM fw updates while running Fedora, which does not use fwupd.

Which I had not thought about previously. Time to read more! thanks for the prompt/rabbit hole!

@neil From my personal experience, I'd recommend a "small form factor" Dell desktop. They have firmware updates through fwupd (UEFI capsule updates), and if you look at the messages during these updates, they're kinda like laptops (with EC); the external power brick is AFAIK the same as their laptops. You can add the optional VGA port for a server-like experience (no BMC though, they're desktops after all). No idea about UK availability, I'd expect they're easily available.

@neil My experience with GMKTek, who do small machines, is you're out of luck with any sort of regular firmware update after the first year or so. One of the SFF (small form factor) options from a big name vendor (Dell/Lenovo/HP) is likely to be your best option as they're often chasing the enterprise market and therefore have a long support lifetime.

@neil Any interest in a framework 12 mainboard (13th gen i5, 2p8e)? Firmware updates come regularly via fwupdate.

Main downside is you would need a USB NIC and DDR5, although 8gb isn't ruinous.

You can buy the kit new of course. Or a FW13 mainboard.

@neil There's the Byte mini pc from @starlabssystems who are UK based, though prices on those seem to have got a bit 'unfortunate' since all the RAM and SSD price traumas of late :-(

@neil unstated but i think implied: you don’t want to build something?

@neil @Amgine if you're OK with non-fwupd firmware update schemes then the System76 stuff could be an option? IIUC they only support their own firmware update daemon, but the firmware is open source. The people who I know who buy them have had good luck, and they have a few different sizes of machines so there might be one that fits your definition of "relatively small".

Plus, it's always fun to have a vendor who supports Linux and tells the Windows people they're on their own to figure it out ;)

@neil I have a Dell Optiplex with a recent Intel i7 in it. They come from eBay office clearance people fairly cheaply.

It's quiet, doesn't draw much power and has run continuously for over a year.

@neil I can check to see if it's still the case for this hardware, but they certainly used to come through regularly.

This is on Ubuntu, which I believe uses fwupd.

@neil @hugh I've been using an HP Microserver for years and years, most recently with Unraid. I should imagine the more recent models are amazeballs.

@neil @skylark13 I use the Beelink for my Wirken spec:

https://gebruder.ottenheimer.app/wirken/hardware.html#fern

They do not support fwupd and explain here:

https://bbs.bee-link.com/d/12169-uefi-capsule-update

@neil

Starlabs has a little nuc shaped computer, which definitely fulfils the requirements.

@ starlabssystems@mastodon.social

@neil

And, coincidentally, someone posted a link to this, which hits some of my buttons but not all and I thought it might possibly suit your spec: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt-research/mnt-station

I have no info about the co.

@neil
Dell Optiplex 7010 is 13th Gen Intel, so should probably be getting support updates and Dell supports LVFS.
Or the Asus NUC Pro range, I believe they have LVFS support.

@bobdvb Thank you!