Blog

tl;dr: it depends.

About one year ago, I bought an Intel N100 mini PC (specifically the GMKtec N100 NucBox G3) and compared it to the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB.

A year later, and we have a newer $159 16GB version of that mini PC with a slightly-faster Intel N150, and a new 16GB Raspberry Pi 5.

With the release of a Windows 11 for Arm ISO, it's easier than ever to get an officially-supported install of Windows on many different Arm PCs—now including a Raspberry Pi.

The Windows on R seems like it has run out of steam, as many open source initiatives do, after years of being bludgeoned with support requests being the only way to really get Windows going on a Pi.

But GitHub user (and high-schooler) Botspot just emailed me his BVM project, short for 'Botspot Virtual Machine'.

Nvidia GPUs have been running fine on Arm for a while now—I just upgraded the System76 Thelio Astra to an RTX 4080 Super and am testing it now.

But Nvidia seems to have a partnership with Ampere, which probably leads to their drivers getting priority support, and likely a few special edge cases in code to work around a couple PCIe quirks on the Altra CPUs. Nvidia also builds their own Arm CPUs—a lot of them—so Arm support is definitely a priority for them.

Today I set up a new DeskPi RackMate 12U model, the T2, and compared it to the other existing models (T0 / 4U and T1 / 8U)... and I have to ask: at what point are these racks not 'mini' anymore?

A few weeks ago, power went out for the first time in my studio space, and that meant all my servers just had power cut with no safe shutdown.

Handling power outages is never a top priority... until it's the only priority! And by then it's usually too late! Luckily for me, no data was lost, and my servers all came back up safely.

This week the power company emailed and said they'd be cutting power for maintenance next week, but they don't have an exact time. So it's even more excuse to finally set up NUT on a Pi!