I started a little project a couple of years ago to replace my x86 home machine with a little Raspberry Pi 4. It wasn’t without it’s challenges. It turns out most of the problems with the Pi 4 revolve around power issues with the USB ports. Plug in anything besides a flash drive and all bets are off. This made it hard to do some things, particularly make backups. I kept my old Shuttle running Ubuntu around mostly as an occasional NAS, to rsync a copy of my media and home directory files for backup. The Shuttle is at least a decade old and takes up lots of space and I started thinking about replacing it. I came across a bunch of these Mini PCs on Amazon and decided to spring for this one.

They all seem to come with Windows 10 installed, but no matter I will just install Ubuntu over it. Well, it seems these little machines all use the dreaded UEFI secure BIOS. But the world has come a long way since I first wrestled with UEFI. The install went well, and after a few tweaks of the BIOS (always scary) I am able to boot either Windows or Ubuntu. I guess I’ll harvest the disks in the old Shuttle and use them for backups, store them in the closet, and eventually throw them out, like I have done with so many hard drives in the past.