Day to day activities can be proficiently carried out through laptops, while heavy crunching and 24/7 operations must be carried out through heavily cooled rigs.
So, what's the place for a fanless, low powered mini pc?
I use an Intel NUC with Linux (NUC8i5BEH) for daily work on Linux. Reasons I like it:
- Nearly all-Intel hardware, so very good Linux support.
- Easier to upgrade (3.5" SATA, M.2 NVMe, RAM) than many laptops. (Of course, there are laptops that are also easily upgradeable.)
- Since the firmware is also Intel, probably gets firmware updates for longer than many mainboards.
- Affordable. IIRC it was somewhere between 300-400 Euro a year ago, but same CPU/GPU as the 2000 Euro MacBook Pro 13" 2018 (which still makes it faster than the current crop of 8th generation MacBook Pro 13" 2020).
- Not very noisy under load. Probably noisy for a NUC, but definitely very quiet compared to the Dell workstation I had before.
Downsides:
- No space for another GPU. Though, it has TB3, so an eGPU would be an option.
- Not as extensible as a tower.
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Day to day activities can be proficiently carried out through laptops
For me there is no laptop outside a MacBook (or possibly Windows, but I have never really used Windows). I use a laptop when I am on the go (work, conferences). I do not want to fiddle with drivers, bad battery life, bad noise reduction, xrandr, or whatever when I am on the go. It just has to work.
However, powerful MacBooks are quite expensive and I do not want to carry around a 2500 Euro machine on a trip.
So, I am doing my daily work on a MacBook Air and on the Intel NUC (plus remote work GPU servers).
http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/product.list....
A traditional tower could probably work, but it seems like too much space for what would effectively be a web browsing machine.
So far I'm just sticking with my laptop though.
E.g. tons of business/office machines are this kind of thing. (Of course right now some businesses probably wish more employee machines were laptops)
PCs installed in fixed locations are another use case: meeting rooms, behind TVs in public areas, small servers in shops (e.g. Chick-fil-A deploys clusters of NUCs in stores) etc, ...
Since we've got a bit more desk space now, I'm planning to go a little bigger when the Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs come out.
It could have been a laptop with a connected screen and keyboard etc I guess, but a hp prodesk mini pc in the cupboard next to the small table looks much neater.
The problem: when you consider all the cables you need to plug into the thing, then suddenly it's not so "svelte" anymore.