I am looking to get a secondary computer for my new office space. I am moving in a few weeks and will finally have a proper office but I want to have a set up that is minimal. I figured the Meerkat would be a good option since it is small enough to mount on the back of a monitor. I don’t have to worry about uninstalling Windows or messing around with that either.
The design is very small but the specs sound good. I am just not sure if this is the “best” option for the money. Does anyone own a Meerkat? Are there other mini options that are better for the money?
Well, it is a nice computer. I don’t own one but I can tell you, that it is overpriced. You are mostly paying for the Systems 76 branding. You can compare the base Meerkat to the base Intel Nuc and see what I mean. There is nearly a $200 dollar difference for virtually the same machine. However, the Intel Nuc comes stocked with Windows.
If I were to want a mini, I would just get the cheaper option and get rid of Windows myself and put the Linux distro I want on it. I am not one to pay a large price tag for convenience. Just my opinion on it.
Personally I bought a Lenovo M900 Tiny – got the idea from our host and from STH’s “Project TinyMiniMicro.” The M900 tiny is a lot larger than a NUC/Meerkat, but I paid only $200 for it (maybe it was $300) a couple years ago, for a system with 32GB RAM and some local storage. I run ESXi on it, and I use my filer for NFS-based datastores, so local storage is inconsequential to me. RAM and CPU are what I paid for.
I would like to eventually (in the next few years) replace the M900 tiny with something better. The CPU is fine, but I need more RAM – the M900 replaced a Del R610 with 192GB RAM, and the 32GB limit is hard for me to live under.
I wonder if that type of machine wouldn’t be a perfect VMware horizon client. Possibly a little too overkill? I’m lookin to find the perfect dirt cheap, reliable and tiny horizon client. Vdi is the bees knees of virtual computing imo. It literally achieves what should be every good sys (and net) admins best case scenario. It allows IT to absorb the cost of a users workstation and inject it into the infrastructure. Since you can effectively eliminate almost all expensive local workstations, by providing something super light like a thin client or even a pine book or a raspberry pi like system and beef up the servers. Imagine putting the $1500 each user into nvidia gpus that are stacked in the server rack. A crafty sysadmin would use resource management to on the fly tune up using the gpus for background crypto mining since they’re already paying for the power to run those machines they have all the rates set up with DP is now being in the server is consolidated and it can spin up and down as resources become more available when people log off their virtual machines.
There are so many options out there that are cheaper and you get more value for your money - and really it is not that big of an inconvenience to remove Windows and install Linux these days. It is rather straight forward and easy.
I’d personally get like a rockpi or something since it would certainly be powerful enough to use for torture that I send all my devices through. Including degrading my SSD slightly faster than normal naturally in 2 months because I had to reinstall windows/linux about 10 times in total.
Because they are easier (and cheaper to get for the power you gain so good value at £75) to obtain.
I’m slowly starting to run more server software which use RAM and CPU more.
