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!
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).