[bloopernova]

It's certainly fun to mess with the hardware, but my personal preference would be to use VMs.

It's cheaper, in my opinion, to get a refurbished mini desktop from Lenovo or whatever. They're "real" PCs, and I've found the raspberry pi hardware limitations to be onerous. It's just really nice to have SATA, NVMe, and PCI Express lanes/slots. For the price of a couple of PIs, you can get a powerful CPU with loads of RAM.

[gdrulia]

I listened to this kind of preaching and got myself a Lenovo ThinkCentre with Ryzen 5. What everyone forgets to mention is that these are loud. Fans are small and they spin fast. And fanless used mini pc market is kind of dry.

[bloopernova]

Huh, that sucks I'm sorry you've had a bad experience. I hadn't considered fan noise, the "Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 Tiny" I got is mostly silent... I probably don't stress it very much!

[saidinesh5]

Plenty of fanless Intel atom/celeron mini PCs out there no?

Also i think you can use ryzenadj to set a very low tdp and disable the fan?

[stirfish]

I use a fanless industrial pc for my desktop. That wasn't my intention when I got it (otherwise I would have gotten something better than a celeron processor) but I've been happy with it.

[vladvasiliu]

As others have said, this depends on your luck and / or the particular model you've got.

My HP EliteDesk 800 G4 has an annoying fan even at the lowest speed. It rattles. The newer G6 model I have at work is quiet.

[j45]

Assuming an average workload… devices like the m80q, m920q are not loud at all. Maybe the computer needs cleaning or is overheating for some other reason.

[ekianjo]

my thinkcentre is completely silent. maybe I was lucky?

[frou_dh]

"Silent" to one person can be annoyingly noticeable to another person. You often see this kind of back and forth in discussions of fan-having devices.