The purpose of a machine is some selfhosted stuff I have in mind, plus occasionally some working on it, as its attached to my home-office shelf, and close to my keyboards and displays.
So I have an old dell optiplex 3050 mini PC, which I am trying to upgrade dropping off the original HDD, and putting in some high capacity SSD as a storage, with the NVME disk as a OS drive. I want to use it as a personal server to serve some selfhosted tools such as nextcloud, some web pages etc. Yet I want to use it as a desktop from time to time, since its anyways attached to a monitor, so sometimes I will maybe be using as a normal work.
What worries me is if I install PopOS desktop, will it be maybe overload - does decreases the hardware usage in some idle time, which I presume server or raspberry PI OS is doing. I am cheering for PopOS as I am already using it with my laptops and have zero issues with hardware or updates.
Should I maybe use some other desktop instead, maybe some lightweight WM?
Thanks!
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Install a hypervisor.
Install best desktop OS in one VM.
Install best Server OS in another.
Your DE won’t use that much cpu no matter which you use.
As long as you want to run out of ram you should be fine.
But imo it’s a bad idea to mix a server os with a normal desktop use.
How about using proxmox and having a vm just for desktop use, like this you could also just pause all the resources easily when you’re not using your desktop computer. Personally i would have a debian stable and a proxomx vm and just enable the proxmox vm whenever I need it.
If your not scared of scripting you could also unsuspend the vm via a keyboard listener. (for example trigger unsuspend when key f3 is pressed. This would be doable with evtest and qm resume )
Or if you don’t want to use a vm you could also disable the autostart of the DE and start it via shell when you really need it.
proxmox
to be completely honest, I have never heard of this one. I will check it out - many thanks!
I would actually install a classic server linux without GUI. But you might install cockpit for having a nice webui to manage your server. Thats much more resourceefficient
Have you heard of UnRaid?
I run two daily driver / gaming VMs simultaneously on one CPU and motherboard with two GPUs. Then I have services running on UnRaid’s built-in Docker (Plex, Home Assistant, file/photo “cloud,” etc). Though I’m reconfiguring my setup to be more services based and less dedicated to VMs.
For example, I have Blender running as a service (Docker container) that I can access via web browser on any device (including my smart tv, just because I could).
You can choose to either “pin” (exclusively dedicate) resources to some things or let them be dynamically shared. There’s caveats with that when it comes to passing hardware through to VMs (mainly GPUs).
Debian
I run proxmox on my optiplex with a 3rd gen i5 (dont remember actual name) and 16gb of ddr3. I have truenas, HA, docker and pihole on it, but i dont run it heavily as its just for playing around. Its run smoothly tho.
Unraid