A Mini PC For Me

September 17th, 2020

Its been a while since I had a desktop. In college, I primarily used a jailbroken iPhone with a top of the line gaming rig built off Newegg. If I'm honest, these two devices were all you really needed. All my textbooks fit on the phone and all the heavy duty tasks were completed when I got home on the PC. Laptops... Fuggedaboutim.

Well that was until lightning took out that blue LED riddled machine and I bought a MacBook for the first time shortly afterward (which is a whole other topic for another time.)

A few weeks ago, though, I took the plunge on one Intel's tiny, powerful mini PC's called the NUC and what-do-you-know. The thing is an absolute delight!

I had entertained the thought of turning it into a Hackintosh, but the loss of Bluetooth connectivity among other features dissuaded me. Windows, too, was not high on my priority list as it can often add a few unsightly steps during dev work. So I decided to finally jump ship and daily drive Ubuntu for the first time.

And what an absolute joy it has been to use. The freedom, compatibility, and customization options this distro has is wonderful. While I debated Pop!_OS and Mint, I ultimately settled on tried and true Ubuntu. Migrating everything I use day to day on MacOS to this has gone smoother than I could've imagined.

I got around to setting up a NAS at my place too. I'm not one to pay for a Dropbox subscription, so having a 4TB network drive has been great. Syncing up shared folders between the two machines has been really nice. Routine backups enabled on both machines and I am now in business.

We'll see how it goes.

To be continued...