I’ve been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is… delicious!
I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).
So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).
Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?
Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.
Have a J4125 driving an entertainment center fairly competently, was eyeing a N5105 as a personal device.
What all do you run on it? Does it support 4K streaming? Remote Plex users or just local for you?
Just local, streams 4k fairly OK but will studder sometimes, not enough to be a problem in general but if you want a perfect image full time you might be disappointed.
Its primarily a media player and runs 8 and 16 bit emulators. Haven’t tried anything more ambitious yet. It streams content from my NAS just fine. I don’t think multiple users would work on it for video streaming however others uses maybe.
Thanks for the rundown. My other usecase is running a GitHub Runner and running some CI/CD or automations kind of work. Some data pipeline work, some npm builds. Right now that all runs on my main Windows PC that’s also the media center and gaming PC. Overloaded that fella, so thinking of expanding the homelab to purpose-based machines.
