Same, but it does a pretty shitty job at everything I throw at it as a result. Might pick up a refurbished m1 Mac mini and put asahi on it. They are relatively cheap these days.
I have one of these things, though a slightly older model.
Beelink Mini S12 Pro Mini PC, 12th Gen Intel-N100 (4C/4T, Up to 3.4GHz), 16GB RAM DDR4 500GB PCle SSD, Mini Desktop Computer 4K@60Hz, Dual Display, WiFi6, BT5.2, USB3.2, LAN, Low Power https://a.co/d/dxxV7yK
I got something similar - it takes a little bit of elbow grease to get Linux running well on it due to the very new chipset (just the wifi/BT drivers though so if you only plan to hardwire, no issues)
Really ridiculously low power draw too.
Yeah,I used the same Beelink for my absolutely legal Plex setup. In my case it was getting drivers for HW video encoding working. Fantastic little machine in the end.
I got a similar fanless PC that has an n305 processor, USB 3.2 and two m.2 slots. I’m trying to figure out how to use it as a nas for at least two 14tb drives + virtualization server, Plex server, arrs, home assistant, etc.
Do you use any drives connected to your beelink? I’m thinking about getting a DAS but they look kind of pricey and I’ve read horror stories about USB drives disconnecting. Seems like USB 3.2 speeds might help with that tho?
Note: I ask this from a place of complete ignorance, having never owned a machine with Apple silicon…this is just for my own curiosity. With that said:
Is it better to put something like Asahi on there than to leave it MacOS? Obviously, if we could have fully-featured and fully-optimized Linux running on the M1, that would be ideal, but I worry that a port like this would be pretty janky for a quite a long time while they reverse engineer everything
You can run most docker applications on the m1 on macOS just fine. I use it for anything a rpi would do and more.
I have an m1 MacBook Air, and I can say that asahi runs very well these days. It’s definitely not done yet but it’s useable and much much better than macOS for server applications. They have a gpu driver now and everything base-Linux runs flawlessly ime. MacOS is still needed for updating firmware etc, however I would feel completely comfortable using asahi on it as using macOS for such things is a hassle. Docker and podman are just imperfect and not fun to use ime.
