I've been running smartos at least since 2015 where I co-located my server. There have been times where I felt like giving up, but people like danmcd, jperkin and others always stepped in and fixed what needed to be fixed for LX to be usable and working. (Keeping java updated and running is hard, uphill battle. Thanks!)
I always ran a mixture of OS and LX zones and bcantrill's t-shirt with "Save the whales, kill your VM" made sense. I've used zones in Solaris 10 even before and they just click with me. FreeBSD's jails are nice, but far from it. And linux's cgroups are a joke. And using KVM/VMs for security containerization is just insane.
At dayjob, I've implemented multiple proxmox clusters, because we're linux shop and there's no way to "sell" smartos or tritonDC to die-hard debian colleagues, but I've managed to sell them ZFS. With personal stuff, I like my systems to take care of themselves without constant babysitting and SmartOS or OpenBSD provide just that. I don't dislike windows, I love UNIX. You could really feel those extra 20y UNIX had compared to linux.
I migrated all my stuff to proxmox for like 2 months. And then went back to SmartOS, because there was something missing ... probably elegance, sanity, simplicity or even something you'd call "hack value".
I'm running it's older cousin - N36L with 4 Drives. The CPU in that one is Athlon II Neo N36L with 12W TDP, 3.5" spinning drives are 7-10W per drive. So 40W is very reasonable.
Op should just run more services on his server, but that probably won't be 43W at idle, when the box would actually be doing something ...
There's just one slightly opaque pitfall, not all laptops have a BIOS setting where you can specify what to do on power-loss and power-resume. So the laptop "server" stays off and you need to intervene manually.
Been converting friends and colleagues to refurbished Fujitsu Futros S720 for quite some time, because RasPis are not attainable. They go for like €21 with 2G mSata SSD and 2G RAM, it's dual-core AMD SoC with up to 1.65GHz CPU frequency and 4-12W power usage.
They can be upgraded up to 1T mSata (limit) + 1T (or bigger) 2.5" SSD in mirror, 8G DDR3 SO-DIMM RAM or for example w/ 2 port GigE Realtek Network card in the mPCIe slot (reusing m-sata plastic stando-ffs). The SoC (AMD Jaguar core (AMD GX-217GA)) even have AES-NI.
For the SSD, you just need L-Shaped SATA cable and USB header to SATA power cable for peanuts from ali express.
S920 has even PCIe slot, so with riser or ribbon cable, you could hook up 4 port intel GigE network card and have 5 port firewall with pfSense, OPNsense or OpenBSD router.
I run mine with OpenWRT, because that mpcie 2-port GigE card is Realtek with lousy support in anything else than Linux.
What's uber-awesome with these boxes, they're passively cooled, so there's no noise apart some minor coil whine at boot.
EDIT: The box has mSata and mPCIe slots, but only plastic stand-offs in mSata. Ethernet card goes into mPCIe, reusing the stand-offs. Fixed that.
Does this work for anybody?
I've just tried it in a KVM Debian 11 VM on proxmox. Deploying from yml manifest does not like my `ssh: true', removing existing /etc/firecracker/manifest/*.yml file segfaults the daemon. Trying to `ignite run ubuntu:latest` or `ignite run alpine:latest` dies on trying to run init ... where's the benefit of leveraging existing containers?
FWIW, I've installed Monterey on the 11" Air Early 2014 and indeed, no root patching is necessary. OCLP only needs to be installed in the EFI partition to boot.
In that thread, you get to learn how you can run latest chromium on Maverics. Firefox is a toast now. General rule of thumb being don't run old OS and old browser on internet-facing machine.
you could still get mac minis that would run 10.9 officially without the headaches. (2012 vintage ...)
EDIT: There are drivers missing for newer hardware in 10.6-10.9. Haven't tried if OCLP could help with this.
Used Debian and Ubuntu on Macbook Air 2015 before. In ubuntu everything works out of the box, but camera - you need to compile your own driver from github. You pay a bit in battery life and heat for having an FOSS operating system - ballpark being 5h vs 7h. Fan gets audible too compared to macos.
At some point, this macbook started to freeze with lots of % in sys in linux while doing not so much. Reinstalled macOS back, but had a problem with exactly 10s freeze the world on every wifi reconnect, totally reproducible. Took me 2-3 months to realize that there's something called SMC that could be re-set. This fixed it back, but I stayed on macos/Monterey for now.
Actually, I'm running Monterey on mac mini late-2012 with i7 and 16G of RAM and if I don't apply the root patches, I don't have transparency or acceleration in the UI. After root patching for the first time and then installing apple patch later down the road, OCLP reminded me it needs to re-apply those patches.
Have another macbook air 11" (early 2014) that's stuck on Big Sur. Mentally valuing the options - last monterey patch fixed two 0-days, there's no patch for big sure. So is it better to go with Monterey and sacrifice a bit of SIP?
csrutil looks like this, FWIW:
$ csrutil status
System Integrity Protection status: unknown (Custom Configuration).
Hi Wowfunhappy, you got me thinking. Like ... really thinking. So, to cut long story short, I've installed Maverics in a VM to do a short & free PoC, how much would I like this "retro" experience with iWork, iLife and friends.
Turns out, very much! So I've grabbed a refurbished mac mini from 2012 and now I'm running Maverics on real hardware and absolutely love it! I've even patched the snow leopard window controls, so I'm one happy camper! Thank you!!!
> 4. Disabling all the new phone-home daemons Apple added.
Would you care to elaborate what do you disable?
I didn't use any icloud stuff and was kinda shocked how much the OS called the mothership after installing little snitch ... Never properly gotten into finding what every daemon does and if I could disable it.