The problem is “Evil” people who see rules now know what abuse they can get by with and they have incentive to find all the weird loopholes the the rest of us wouldn’t think of. I don’t know a good answer to this.

minis like the N100 when you are using it to do things has a lot more ability and uses a similar amount of watts (or can do a lot more for more for just a bit more watts). However when the box is just sitting there with the power on but otherwise doing nothing it uses more power than ARM based single board computers. So the real question is how much will they want to do when they are using it, and how often will that be. If they are watching movies/playing games for 16 hours a day the mini PC is the better answer and won’t really cost more energy to run. If they are leaving this on, but only using it for a couple hours per month than a device that uses less watts will save money.

NAS can be two different things.

NAS is just “network attached storage”: a computer that has a bunch of disks attached to your network. IF you put a single disk on your network and nfs/samba to share it you have created a simple NAS - I strongly recommend you put in more drives for redundancy, but that is all NAS is.

Often NAS is taken to mean not just the above, but a custom machine that does the above. The downside is these custom machines are often slow, and put weird hardware/software on them such that if the whole box breaks (as opposed to just a single disk failing which they are good at handling) you may not be able to recover anything. One variation of this you want more space and discover you can’t upgrade it at all. They are an easy way into NAS, but the downsides are such that I can’t recommend them anyway.

Many NAS work like that though. Hardware RAID always seems to work like that so if you get a fancy card that supports RAID you been make sure you have a good long term support contract that will be there for you when there are problems (if you are not paying hundreds of thousands per year you don’t have a good support contract)

Not all are that way. Many run ZFS which is great for this and you can replace broken hardware and recover. BTFS is commonly used as well, probably not as good as zfs but likely good enough.

I’ve been using fastmail for a long time for this now. I’ve been happy, not to expensive. I’m surprised they haven’t been recommended, normally when the question is asked there are a million fastmail recommendations

Changed my family dashboard from magic mirror to a home assistant dashboard. I’m missing some cute things, but the major functions work better, and I get some options that I didn’t before.

RaidZ1 is not the same as a mirror. I’m not sure if you are allowed to have Z1 with only 2 disks, but if you are you still shouldn’t because while it scales down that far it still does parity calculations and writes that to the second disk instead of just writing a copy of the data (the parity calculations probably result in the same data, but I doubt this is optimized)

ZFS snapshots are easy to settup. If you don’t notice that you deleted all the snapshots for a month you never will.

you still should have offsite backups for a fire, but the notion that raid isn’t backup is not really correct since for most people the situations that raid with snapshots isn’t enough protection will never occure and to the risk is acceptable. Plus raid is a lot easier to get right. For that matter if you have a backup but don’t have the password after the fire you don’t have a backup.

though if you rely on raid alone I’d want 3 disk redundancy.

Everything starts with what my family needs/uses. Jellyfin for media. Grocy to track which kid has done their chores. Home assistant to make a nice dashboard in the kitchen to see the family calendar (still on google) and the chores. I’ve tried a few other things, but those are the ones important to me.

I only have leagally owned movies. I’m technically violating some law but since I can show the judge the originals and they are not available outside myhome they won’t dare go after me - a jury won’t convict and even if one would I’m a perfect ‘normal man’ who proved the law is unjust. I won’t be as well known as Rosa Parks in history but I’d be a perfect story to rally around to get the las changed and they won’t risk that

After verifying that OP’s intent was met I gave a more fun answer that abused the letter of what was asked.

Yes. However as others have already said odds are you don’t have the right devices. Still if you really work at it everything exists. Start by selecting one of the few TVs that support it, then get a good HDMI cable, make sure you have a video card that supports it, with drivers for the OS (you might have to write them yourself), then just setup networking. This would be an interesting hack, I’d love to see someone get it working and show their setup, but it is otherwise useless and will be a lot of work.

Cage is not what I want from a kiosk. I want window management, I just want a few fixed windows in fixed positions. Sometimes I want to rotate between a few windows. I’m running Magicmirror now which gives what I want, but it is too slow and too locked into the everything is a web app model.

I have a pi3 with a 20" touchscreen that I’m using. Raspbian booting to magic mirror. It works, but Magic Mirror is slow bloated/slow that I’m not happy with it. I’m about ready to make my own QT based signage - I suspect it will be much more performant as well as more flexible. Still it is a lot of work and so I hesitate to bother (even if version one could be done in a day - I have enough other projects).

FreeBSD - it won’t be easy, but I’ve been a BSD guy at heart for decades… You will learn a lot and eventually be able to create better systems, but it will be years before you should risk putting anything important on a system - as a noob you have a lot to learn the hard way. Once you think you know FreeBSD you should try the other BSDs, and things like gentoo linux: you will really learn how this works.

You can follow the advice of the others and get a system going sooner. It isn’t a wrong choice, but you won’t learn as much and if something doesn’t work the way you want you are stuck since you can’t dare change anything. As such I have to advice against it despite all the time/effort my advice will cost you.

You can start with used but modern x86 - the n100 line - has very low power usage and will long term be a better investment. A pi is about the same cost once you get the accessories needed and uses as much power to get work done, but can do less work. (If the computers are idel the pi wins)

I had found that. A lot of projects are early releases that have not been touched in years - is that because they are stable or because the author gave up before making them useful? Which is why I want not a list but an opinion from someone else doing this.

I have enough of a machinist background to doubt the threads are anywhere close to perfect. However if you are saying more than good enough I will agree.

Or is it better to save a few bucks now and save it for next year when something new comes out that is faster anyway. Maybe there is a new codec that matters in 3 years but nothing today supports: so either way you are forced to replace your server.

There is no right answer, you are taking your chances when planning for the future. There are many computers more than 10 years old still working just fine in the world, and it is possible that whatever you buy today will be as well. We get enough press releases that we can predict what will happen next year close enough, but in 5 years we have much less information. There is no way to know if saving money is a good choice today or not. I can come up with scenarios either way.

Look at power use. Often last generation hardware uses more power for the things you do today and so the few dollars you save today are made up with in the power bill over the next couple years. (though if you use that new hardware to do something the old couldn’t do the new will use more power!)

If there is only a few dollars difference in price go for the best. However when there are hundreds or even thousands of dollars it becomes a harder decision.

Parts fail all the time. The problem with hardware raid is you need a compatible controller or none of the data can be read even though it is still on the physical disks. Computer hardware is often only made for a few months before there is a new model and so you are risking that the manufacture really made the new model work with what you have. That is assuming the manufacture doesn’t go out of business which could happen without warning. \

Also, if hardware breaks that is often a good excuse to replace it - odds are better hardware is available for the same price and sometimes a lot less $ - with hardware raid you are stuck paying whatever price they charge.