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Comment by drusklo | Hacker News Reader

Honest question; why would you want a server with mac os? I am asking because I thought about getting a mac mini for that purpose, because the hardware is great, but running mac os vs linux is what is throwing me off.

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A Mac mini (or studio, or however it's called these days) is supposedly one of the more affordable ways to self-host LLMs these days.

Being able to resume such a server after a power outage when traveling sounds great.

I run a render farm on macs. I'm getting so much more performance from a basic Mac Mini that it's not even funny.

Also a bit of CI on these because why not.

Managing remote macOS instances is a constant PITA, including, but not limited to ssh access quirks.

A couple of reasons for me to run it: - time machine - photos.app backup (have photos.app download local copies of your iCloud photos library, backup the photos.app files) - build server for ios/ipados/macos apps

I use linux SMB targets for Time Machine and PhotoSync and it works just fine. There's also icloudpd, but it requires ADP off.

I use it as a plex server and it can handle anything you throw at it. Previously plex was running on the synology NAS itself and it would choke with a couple concurrent transcodes

Build servers.

Currently, someone has to head down to the basement and turn the mac on manually if it dies/crashes for any reason. Huge pain in the psu.

I'm browsing for something to replace my M1 mini, possibly a non-Mac. With Tahoe around the corner, running a Mac headless seems to be the best option to cope with the redesign.

Have you considered https://asahilinux.org/ ?

It sounds like they already are, and questioning what benefits having a remote MacOS server would give them.

Time Machine backups could be one reason?

Time Machine does not require Mac. You can point it to e.g. a SMB share as destination as well.

Unfortunately they only support M1/M2 (last time I checked - hardstuck). It would be a great choice to repurpose existing hardware, but I wouldn't go shopping for Asahi specifically.

I mean, why not? There's few drawbacks. Low power usage, high performance, stable OS that can about the same software Linux can. You get the added benefit of interfacing with Apple's ecosystem and iCloud, so you could e.g. back up your Photos database remotely. You can remote in and have a fully featured desktop available anywhere.

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