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I have an old as eff laptop hiding behind my TV, and I use Unified Remote to make my phone act like a wireless mouse and keyboard for it.
Also, Proxmox is basically the answer to "I hate big tech and have a lot of time to kill. How do I deal?" Make one computer into 30 mini servers.
Are they worth salvaging?
I think they are worth salvaging, if but for a little while until at such time you wish to upgrade to something else.
but I don’t know much about Linux
Here's a good opportunity to buff up your skill set. With two units, you can get into simple networking one device to another. Things like that. I see Proxmox has been mentioned and that might be an avenue to explore. Generally, I don't toss a piece of equipment unless it has zero possibilities for use. I can always find something to do with old equipment even if it's just testing out something new I've learned recently, without screwing up my main stack.
The Mac Mini should still be perfectly usable if you put Linux on it and upgrade it to an SSD.
Any recommendations on SSD and which Linux distro?
You can get an adapter board that will make it work with an M.2 SSD. I believe it's only PCIe 2.0, so there's no point putting a high end SSD in it unless you need a high write endurance. Any SSD will be a huge improvement over a hard drive.
Most Linux distros will run on it since it's using a 64 bit Intel CPU. If you have the version with 4GB of RAM, you will need something very lightweight though. I would run Debian if I was going to use it as a server or Mint if I was going to use it as a desktop.
My NAS is a 2014 Mac Mini running OMV. It works great, very capable little Linux machine. Don't bother with Mac OS.
Which Linux distro do you have running on your Mac mini?
OpenMediaVault is based on Debian. I think it's currently OMV 7, but I'm not at home at the moment so I can't check. Very solid system though.
I installed Proxmox on an old MacMini. It works great for spinning up virtual machines for things like a pinhole, qBittorrent, or a Minecraft server.
*piehole
The only bummer is the requirement of wired Ethernet
I got wireless working in Debian on a 2012 Mac Mini, maybe there's still hope?
Your name gave me a chuckle. At first I thought it said 'lemmy_clear_my_throat' However, if you do somehow manage to deploy Proxmox with Wi-Fi capabilities, I've got a project, so do please share any findings.
Didn't mean to give false hope, just meant that after a bunch of tinkering I eventually got WiFi working on the Mac Mini running debian itself, so maybe there's hope for wireless in proxmox, but unfortunately I have no experience with that.
With proxmox?
Nah, this was for the Mac Mini running debian itself. I haven't had any experience running proxmox, but was just idly wondering that maybe there's a path to get it working in there given the there was a (PITA) path for getting it working in debian.
If it has wired Ethernet, proxmox is like, a small miracle of convenience. You can slice and dice multiple machines from one. It's litterally one for the best pieces of diy infra support I've ever experienced...
But you gotta be hardwired.
any other linux distro can do vms and containers, too. arguably it's easier to do that than with proxmox.
but yeah, i wanted to check it out so threw it on the drive i pulled from my old broken laptop to check it out and discovered the wifi omission. i even tried to install base debian and ensure wifi was set up first then convert to a proxmox install. sadly, proxmox's network stack is in conflict with any other linux network libs and actively uninstalled whichever one i had set up during the proxmox conversion.
i get their reasoning for not supporting wifi after looking it up but imho completely removing it as a possibility is a bit not cool, bro. i wasn't trying to do any high availability or multiple nodes or anything like that so it wouldn't have been an issue for my use case anyway.
discovered the wifi omission.
TIL I didn't realize that Proxmox doesn't support Wi-Fi. Well, now I can scratch one project off the list.
No idea what Proxmox is but will research!