Mini PC - Win11 - WWYD ?

I would just buy a mini-PC with nothing, install whatever Windows 11 you think is prudent, then install Linux. Now, you don't have to screw around with virtual machines, and everything works with minimal effort. Your machine is then a dual boot.

Any other course of action, should be tested or simulated in advance.

I don't really like Hyper-V. This is the second time I've tried it on Pro, and went away with nothing. VMWare Workstation Player works, but it has "interface traps" where you can get in trouble. (They encrypt the control file and then you cannot edit your way out of an interface trap.) VirtualBox is the first cross-platform thing, which is usable by mere humans. Linux has several repackagings of QEMU KVM, such as Gnome Boxes, each one, an acquired taste. I can get a job done faster with VirtualBox, then move on to something else.

Intel got rid of its NUC division and Asus now runs the product line. But when the word "business" appears, the security features can be a nuisance on them (more likely to prevent Linux from installing, while the Secure Boot key situation is in flux). And the price on these, is never cheap.

But some of the smaller companies, make cheaper product. This doesn't have an OS. Don't buy product, without examining the user manual first (for BIOS adequacy). A s*it BIOS can ruin a cheap offering. The storage on this, may run at SATA port rates (not a problem).

Beelink MINI PC N95 MINI $165 Alder Lake N

Processor Graphics Intel UHD Graphics Execution Units 16

You can install OSes in either order, but one order is less work. Win11 <version>, then a Linux. When Windows Upgrades come in, like

I'm running four activated OS flavours (multiboot) off the same key. The behavior may differ, if the key is in ACPI MSDM (Asus NUC), than if you are using a retail W10 Pro key (potential for more combinations).

upgrade Win10 Pro key ---------> Win11 Pro If you use ShowKey, the two on | the left might show the original key, | sidegrade while the two on the right will show v upgrade "generic" keys. But I'm not going to Win10 Home ------------> Win11 Home shut down, swap drives and take pictures of all that. You could use ProduKey, but you have to shut Windows Defender off, and it doesn't stay off long enough for comfort.

But I'm not going to "promise" you anything :-) It just seems to work. Who knows when you try it. It's really hard to guess just how many key types and behaviors there are. Their big cheese said they would simplify the schemes they had, and that idea just went out the window, and it only became worse. There isn't even a way to query a key in hand, and have Microsoft tell you precisely what *kind* of key it is, and where it came from. When you see a license for 20% of retail or less, you have to wonder what the "gotcha" is.

Win10 and Win11 will put a watermark on the screen, after enough hours, when they are not activated, but the grace period appears to be infinity. Earlier OSes had 30day/90day grace. Some of the Windows OSes in the past have been very badly behaved when moved (lock-up). I can move the W11 Home off this AMD PC, to the older Intel PC which is not Win11 compatible, and it boots just fine and you can use it. Almost (but not quite), a Linux feature set.

Paul

It uses three flavours of font rendering, on the same damn screen. Make up your mind, Microsoft.

Depending on what's left of your eyesight, it's a graphical disaster. Win10 just seems to be more legible.

Paul

So, don't buy the default - easy enough to buy new machines with pro. Or, upgrade to pro.

(If you don't mind faffing about a bit then you can get Hyper-V running using home as well)

The first time I tried it, I could make no sense of it - there seemed to be no way to actually create or spec a VM. It was only later when I tried in on a Win 11 box, and found all the options that were missing on my version where there and working. I realised the main problem was the VM Management service was not running properly - so the Hyper-V manager was lacking all the controls to actually create new VMs. A bit of uninstalling and reinstalling fixed that, and since then it works reliably.

Virtualbox is certainly easy to get up and running. The performance is not bad, but not quite as good as the type 1 hypervisors. When running windows VMs on a windows host, the integration is not quite as good and things like support for screen modes can be a bit of a nuisance at times.

I used one of those recently - their top end i7 with 32GB RAM and a Samsung Evo 980 Pro NVMe SSD. I was actually very impressed. The close to 7GB/sec sequential transfer on the SSD even inside a VM was impressive. It sits in a clients comms cabinets and pretends to be 4 computers for remote users, and works well. About the only bit I was less keen on was the fan can make quite a racket if the machine is working hard.

MS seemed to have knobbled some of the key flexibility of late. I tired to upgrade a Win 7 pro box to Win 10 the other day and could not do it with the existing key for either a clean install or using the Win 10 media creation tool.

Yup they run indefinitely but restrict the ability to personalise some aspects of the UI when not activated.

I think they revamped the whole HAL concept from win 10 on - so it got much better at adapting to new hardware after initial install.

You didn't mention what brand, but today £179 after -£60 voucher code

Thanks for the replies all.

In th eend I went for 2 PCs. - a 16Gb Beelink N100 and an 8Gb Acemagic N95

Decided to plonk debian12 on th e16Gb to replace my 15 year old desktop "server".

Pulled one of my 4Tb RAID disks from old machine, and paired it with a new one (I got last year for this job) and it rebuilt in just over 6 hours. One the old machine it took 28 hours.

I'll keep the 8Gb machine for windows and make it dual boot.

Strange that you used the large memory machine as a server.

I am currently commissioning my new server on a Pi 4B with 1GB of RAM. IOts plenty. RAM is need on the desktop to run browsers and video editors. And XP in a VM

For the extra few quid ...

I know very well how quickly a machine can become overwhelmed.

I've decided to use docker containers where possible. So that's deluge, get_iplayer. My brother suggested jellyfin as a media server but I have a feeling the docker version is slightly limited.

Depends rather on what you run on your server... Plex can be quite memory hungry if you have a large catalog of media.

Servers can also be handy for running a number of VMs and plenty of memory helps with that.