The worst laptop you can find could probably be better than even a reasonably specced VPS. Low end VPS are dire, and you can get some pretty decent laptops for almost nothing. If it’s pre 8th Gen. Intel they’re basically worthless on the used market. But they’ll still easily get the job done.
My friend had an older MSI gaming laptop and it was built like SHIT. He didn’t use it a whole lot until he started working at our company and it lasted maybe 4 years of reasonable daily use. Physically it was fine because he never actually touched the laptop. But that thing was so incredibly unstable and eventually ended with it’s M.2 and it’s internal sata slots being unusable, and making the machine take 5 minutes to boot.
I also bought two MSI “business” laptops and those things were absolute junk too. The touch panel came from the factory broken. Thankfully nobody wants to use that shit so we just disabled. But my co worker dropped one the other day and we need to replace the whole display assembly but I can’t for the life of me find parts for the machine. After about two weeks of searching my only options were A. a whole ass laptop for $500 (thankfully they depreciate lick a rock) or B. A complete display assembly for $375. No thanks, we’re replacing those pieces of shit.
Unless you want to game on it save yourself the suffering and just get a used thinkpad. The T14 gen 1 goes for $200 easily and it’s quadcore CPU is sufficient, and you can find it with the 6 core. I bought a T14 s gen 2 AMD for $300 and it’s 6 core blows that T14 out of the water and gets far better battery life, plus it’s iGPU ain’t no slouch. (All prices USD, can will probably be higher)
Side note are there any good hardware swap communities on lemmy? I have a number of old machines I need to get rid of.
I have an N100 box for my router and it’s great for singe gigabit or less. But > 1gbit and you really quickly need some serious hardware.
At work I was using a VM with 2 cores from a xeon 4215 and it struggled to get anything more than 2 gbit. As soon as I bumped it up to 4 cores I was able to get the full 4gbit speeds. If I wanted to do any traffic shaping or packet inspection speeds would tank. Also my OpenVPN speeds kinda suck on this N100 device. They’re never great, but I can definitely tell I’m getting CPU bound vs when I ran it on my server. So if you plan on running extra services don’t expect the greatest performance.
A lot of networking traffic is single core dependent so I’ve been trying to find one of those weird 5 core machines with 1 P core and 4 E cores which I think would be the perfect fit.
Uefis have been around since ~2010 so at this point all distros understand how to use them, and at this point default to working perfectly with them.
Secure boot is the only real potential road block. You can just turn it off if you don’t care about it.
After switching to Mac OS I have 0 interest in using Linux on my actual conputer. I still have windows machine for work, and my servers are all Linux. But any machine I want to use is gonna run Mac.
Windows 10 is over 10 years old at this point. Microsoft learned from XP It can’t live forever.
Businesses typically lease their machines for 2-3 years so they all support 11. And do you really think the government cares about regular citizens? lol.
It would be cheaper than your current option, and provide you much more software freedom, including system wide ad blocking, Firefox with uBlock Origin, LibreTube, the ability to run AI models offline with more than 4GB RAM, the ability to run custom launchers, home apps and SMS apps, and ability to install apps without logging into a megacorporation.
What if you don’t care about any of those?
Plus if something has been ignored for so long that it basically needs a full rewrite of some aspect then even if you have the skills to do it, you can’t realistically do it because it’s such a big problem.
Docker requires hardware virtualization so kinda but not really. Apparently it runs inside of a VM so that’s a no go.
Honestly I think you’re asking way too much for a VPS, or even a full blown server. If you want to run CAD software you’ll also want a remotely capable GPU and you won’t get that in a server unless you’ve explicitly put something in it. The built in GPUs in servers are like radeon 3450s that are 15 years old and are basically just video adapters and not actual “graphics processing units”. If you have your own server I’d throw a GPU in there and try running your software there. But honestly any remotely modern laptop will probably run faster than a cheap rented server.
Docker Desktop for Linux runs a Virtual Machine (VM).
Looks like you’d still need virtualization.
With a vps expect to lose all virtualization
I love booting up servers. 95% of the boot process is spent on the ram check. 4% is spent on the actual bios things, and 1% is actually booting the OS.
Even on my home server (a desktop with 64 gigs of ram) the ram check takes longer than the OS.
The speed difference between my brand new 7200rpm 20TB HDD and a random ass sata SSD is still astounding. Sequentially the HDD is only half as slow. But booting an OS or loading files the HDD is maybe a 10th the speed. Small sequential files is where SSDs shine, especially when it comes to high end NVME drives. That’s why iops are always included in benchmarks.
Windows on an HDD takes like 1-2 minutes to boot. A sata SSD is closer to 30 seconds, and a high end NVME drive is like 10 seconds.
AMD is on a much better process node than Intel, but their battery life still isn’t as good as Apple’s. Particularly under low to medium loads. My M1 MBP easily gets 12 hours of battery life under a real load. My AMD powered ThinkPad is closer to 7 hours, and my Intel machines get like 4, on a good day.
I just straight up cannot do this. Either I’m spending time with family and giving them the attention they deserve. Or I’m spending time focusing on the game and the attention it needs for me to enjoy it. Multi tasking just leads to me ignoring both.
If it’s a small child and you just need to make sure they’re not killing themselves then I can do that. But besides that, to me it’s one or the other.
You still have to waste 30 minutes of your time driving over there. I’m not wasting 30 minutes of my time to save $5
I’m not a playstation fan but I’d buy a PS5 pro before I’d buy a steam deck TBHQ. I have a negative interest in portable gaming.
It’s at least the same inconsistent toolset as everyone else. Windows 10? Ok go through this multi step process. 11? Ok this other slightly different process.
VS Linux you have 700 consistent toolsets, and 70000000 inconsistent toolsets.
Chromebooks never really made sense outside of schools and old people.
The OS is hyper limited to essentially just a web browser, and android apps (so just a web browser). Nobody wants to buy premium hardware to use with just Chrome. But at the same time it’s Chrome, so you really need at least a good chunk of RAM. So it really just limits you to the super light use cases, but those could realistically be replaced by a tablet.
The other day we saw an extremely odd device at malwart. They had a $270 laptop/tablet hybrid thing with a fairly nice OLED display, and a snapdragon CPU that should have been more that sufficient. But 128gb of EMMC storage, and 4 gigs of ram. Such wasted potential. It would make a nice RDP machine I guess.
I think their confusion comes from OPs title.
Why is it “e-waste go brrrrrrr” when OP is presumably saying they’re keeping this laptop out of the machine? _ machine go brr is a dumb meme in the first place, people using it the wrong way makes it even dumberer.