Figuring out what to do with an old Mac Mini (Base M1) Linux?
Hey everyone! I'm pretty glad to have come across Lemmy haha. I was going to start looking into doing some self hosting stuff on Reddit and a lot of people seemed a bit... Opinionated. That said, I have an old base M1 Mac Mini that has been sitting in my closet for a while, and while I do have a simple proxmox setup in my own house for a couple small things, I was considering a fun side project to try to host something for my mom in her house. My main question is has anyone actually tried doing any self hosting stuff on a 8GB model of a Mac Mini with M1? It seems that Asahi linux supports it pretty well, but its all ARM. I have basically no experience with ARM on linux, especially not on a box made by apple. I have very light experience with a Pi 5 but outside of that not much.
7 replies
Most things should work just fine. There's not all that much that requires x86.
So the real question is, what does your mom need/want? NextCloud? Jellyfin media server? Ente photos?
Maybe just a media center? Basically an Apple TV on crack?
have had nothing but a stellar experience with asahi.
I was bummed when I had to upgrade; but, they are close to an m3 release any day now...
Really? What did you end up doing with it? I have always wanted to try it but did want to go down another rabbit hole that I was unfamiliar with haha.
Asahi is great, you can just run whatever.
Mine is mostly a host for my self- created small scale models, but its also a great jellyfin server. The M series is pretty solid for that, or really anything that has GPU loads is good (immich f9r example).
The m -series is great in terms of low power and solid output, highly recommended.
When I had Asahi, I just used it as a daily driver laptop. It worked perfectly fine for all of the stuff I wanted to do on my M1.
For a server, it will probably work fine as well. You have to ensure that say, the apps/docker containers you use support ARM, but ARM is fairly popular and well supported nowadays.
I did have one issue with podman, where apparently the memory is organized differently on the M1, which causes some docker containers, even if they are built for ARM, to be incompatible. I had to use
podman machine, which is podman's built in virtual machine that lets you run containers in their instead. It is designed for Mac OS, which is kind of ironic since the whole point of using Linux was that I wouldn't have to run a virtual machine just to run podman/docker containers.Ok yeah thanks a bunch! And yeah it is pretty silly. I host game servers for the friends and sometimes they dont have linux runners and they dont play nicely in bottles or wine so I have to have a windows VM for those. I try my hardest to stay away from that platform.
I'll have to go give this a shot.
Hmmm, games / game servers are a bit different since, they are rarely ARM and mostly x86.
You can use tools like muvm or fex to run the x86 version of wine, and then use that to run game servers: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-asahi-remix/x86-support/
People have been able to game on the M1 since it has hardware acceleration, although I never gamed.