I bought a Topton GM1 Industrial Mini PC for my HomeLab. It is aimed at running Slackware Linux but I wanted to have a quick look at how well BSD OSes support it out-of-the-box.

↫ Joel Carnat

That’s really all there’s to this story. I just really, really love tiny industrial and office computers and thin clients, and every time I see another one for sale I really have to stop myself from buying one I have absolutely no use for. There’s just something about how these little guys are built that speaks to me – they’re different than regular PCs, but only marginally so, making them fun to play around with, getting drivers for everything, seeing if Linux and BSD have any issues with it, and so on.

They’re also often fanless, which is a major boon. The Dell thin client I wrote about last week has been run through a gauntlet of operating systems to see just how capable it is, and I’m surprise by just how much you can do even with a pedestrian Pentium Silver. For now it’s running Fedora GNOME to get an idea how the most default of default Linux environments performs and feels – so I can include it in future articles about it – but I think I’m going to set it up as a retrogaming console using Batocera.

Industrial, office, and thin client computers are just fun to play around with, and they’re incredibly cheap when buying used. If things like a Raspberry Pi are hard to get, backordered, or overpriced due to demand outstripping supply, it’s definitely a good idea to see if you can find some cast-off thin client or whatever for your project instead.