ProperlyProperTea
Fiery Habanero Doritos
Alliteration, Rhythm, Rhyme, and I like properly made tea.
Cheapest would probably be the Raspberry Pi/Orange Pi route.
I gave up trying to make an HTPC (using Kodi, ChimeraOS, etc). It wasn’t worth the hassle and ended up settling for an Apple TV.
Sure, you can use a VPN if you want to spin up the instance and connect to it without having a domain. You can always open the instance of Nextcloud to the internet later, when you buy a domain.
Get a cheap .XYZ domain if you just want to experiment with spinning up a reverse proxy.
I have an RX6800XT and I use KoboldCPP to run models I download off of Huggingface.
I’m not sure how many tokens per second it generates, probably about 10?
If you want to try it yourself here’s a link to the Github page: https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp
I don’t know what your - and your kid’s - situation is, but I worry pushing Linux onto someone would be counterproductive to getting them to like it.
I only use it because I genuinely like and appreciate it. I’d probably start by getting him interested in it. If he likes it enough then he’ll try and learn more by himself.
I recently got an LLM running locally on an AMD GPU. This was only possible on Linux. Depending on your son, something like that could be a cool way to get him interested.