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!

  • Perpetual_Nuisance@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I don’t understand what you mean with “does decreases the hardware usage in some idle time”?

    I also don’t understand what “overloading” Pop means.

    Light virtualization and a few services - and sometimes also your desktop, when needed - shouldn’t be a problem, but it also depends on which services and how many.

    In general, containerization is easier than virtualization, and has less overhead. If you want to stick with Pop, then you can install docker, docker-compose and portainer. Portainer provides a pretty decent web interface to create and manage containers.

    You can make VMs possible by adding cockpit and cockpit-machines, so that you can create and manage VMs (I’m guessing that cockpit is available for Pop).

    Otherwise Proxmox is a free hypervisor, based on Debian and pretty easy to learn, and then you could have one VM for your self-hosted stuff, and one VM, with Pop on it, to use as your desktop. Turn off when it’s not needed, turn on when it is.

    From there, you can build out your homelab in a somewhat modular fashion, which will also mean that modifications will be less likely to break something, and easier to undo or fix.

    • frickos@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Decreases, such a lowering CPU clock when no load is present. Overloaded, such a shitty software that comes with it with potential security risks, which some of them start with the system load and use resources.

      Yes I planned using docker for each of the tools that supports it from docker hub

      Thanksmfor the reply