Buying a Mini PC NUC

I did a survey of Mini PCs, especially the NUC, and I have following comments and recommendations.

1. The second hand value of a NUC is below 100 dollars.

I come to this in detail.

2. Bare bone NUC is not for Gamers.

3. A good Gamer NUC with DDR 5 costs over 2500 dollars.

4. I bought a bare bone NUC with 4GB RAM two years ago for my work in Ceylon with a huge sum in Rupees (taxes added on top of it).

It has no Audio output which suits my writing style with no interference even with little background music.

I have a Smart Speaker with analogue radio with Bluetooth functionality, which is not compatible with my bare bone NUC.

It has 4 USB slots two gone for mouse and keyboard and other two can be used for Audio link to watch an old film.

I used to watch 3 films a day in my retirement but stopped seeing films for the last 6 months.

Stopped writing books for 9 months.

Mind you, I am in total retirement and sleep very well (did not sleep well in my active life).

Coming to the NUC it uses only 8 Watts when I am writing a book.

It has a small Carbon Foot Print.

That was my Goal and I continue to promote it.

5. If you play a digital game it costs a lot in Carbon Foot Print.

If you go out and play a game of your choice for 90 minutes it is good for your long term health and the amount of Carbon Dioxide you exhale can be mitigated by running a small garden with some mint plant or better still a few coriander plants with lovely aromatic smell.

6. Sitting in front of the TV screen, you become a Living Potato!

7. Coming to NUC if you play games you need 16GB RAM and better still 32GB and the RAM costs a lot.

My minimum is 4GB RAM (with two slots for 8GB RAM).

Mind you computer runs on RAM and 2GB RAM was my minimum a decade ago!

Mind you, I started with 4MB RAM 30 years ago and only played DOS games.

Coming to Linux unlike windows its resource share capability is excellent and I do not use Microsoft Words for nearly 25 years.

8. So if you bought a NUC with 2GB RAM it has no second hand value since upgrading to 8GB RAM is going to be a costly affair.

9. I have several SATA disks varying from 320 to I Terabyte.

1 Terabyte is at home in Ceylon in its original box with all my important files of 30 years (copied from my Desktop Computer) stored.

The 500GB one has old Linux distributions installed and Old Linux Iso files stored for a rainy day.

The third with 320GB, I bought to Australia inside my NUC.

It has now Ubuntu 23.10, Debian 12.4.0 and Emmabantus Debian 5 with only two blog files.

10. All my important files including "Coronavirus Saga" are posted, is in my Google Blog post ready to be cut and paste to a chapter in any of my future books.

My files are not private (except political ones, most of them,   I have removed. I am not a politician fearing a backlash).

11. If you have a NUC, with NVMe slots, it costs a lot to buy DATA storage in Terabytes.

12. Exchange of DATA inside a NUC leads to  a heatwave inside the NUC and without a fan and a heat-sink, it will catch fire especially in Australia.

Besides 60 to 100 Watts output is not conducive for indoor living.

It is like a hot (blowing camp fire) lamp in front of you.

I'll stop at that, and if you invest money invest prudently and the gadget you bought should last for at least 5 years. 

If not you have to dish it to a gullible guy or girl, short of cash for only 100 to 200 dollars.

A waste of resources!

Linux Booting-GRUB-2

Two points to remember.

Point 1

When Linux starts it checks the file integrity every time.

One should wait patiently for it to check the files. One can stop it by hitting Ctr + C but I never do that.

I am multi task man using Linux and I do not want to to start my work with a background daemon working hard to get things right. If file integrity is OK the daemon has only house keeping, to do.

Just today I found (it was warning me that var/etc file has only 400MB left) that Ubuntu was not booting stuck in file checking.

I immediately went to Ubuntu Safe Mode and removed few files and stopped installing new software for checking.

It booted nicely.

Point 2

At boot time and start time Linux gives a running commentary and make a habit to read them and one begin to realized what a lot of house keeping jobs need to be done before giving you the login screen.

Microsoft is obsessed in giving you the Login Screen before it starts that is why Windows SUCK!

Linux Booting-GRUB-2

Linux booting is standardized.

What is important is it gives a run time information of the system which one can read at a leisure using a keyboard short cut and take action as per needs of the system (only root can do that). This is important if the system is shared with other users.

It can boot alone and it can boot with Mac OS or Windows, effortlessly.

Problem is its implementation by various distributions available.

Furthermore, Linux Debian Calamara Installer has its own problems, booting with the EFI partition. 

It does not let or recognize the other distributions residing in the same hard disk or any other disk attached to it (in my case, attached through a USB port in the Intel NUC).

I have gone through this booting protocol hundred times, if not more, it is second nature to figure out the problems associated with the distribution. If problems remains or continue to pester, I dish it out for a better distribution.

First of all, the GPT partition tool which can be booted from a CD or USB stick does not have any issues creating a EFI partition.

It is the responsibility of the developers to implement booting protocol without an added restricting script.

I think Zorin (I have never tested it fully), a commercial distribution that comes from UK that has a script written in, so that another distribution (sorry if I am wrong) cannot boot.

This is true with Sparky Linux that comes from Poland which does not let one uses a user account under the root. It has to be booted with root permission which exposes all the file system and the password that can be exploited.

That is why I almost blacklist (there are other subtle reasons) Sparky Linux.

Astra Linux also does not permit user account but in defense of it, it lets one boot other distributions including windows.

There are no more options left for Russian developers.

The 3 distributions that seamlessly configure EFI boot partition are

1. Ubuntu

2. Emmabantus

3. Debian 12.4.0 version (not the 11 series)

Coming back to booting there is no GRUB version 1.

Legacy Version or Zero (0) Version do exist but it jumped to GRUB 2 Version.

I haven't had any problem with GRUB 2 but only the implementation or the use of EFI partition by various developers with insinuating scripts at boot time that restricts, parallel booting. 

The Linux distributions that are commercially orientated are the culprits.

They cannot match Debian and Ubuntu (Ubuntu is Debian based).

One cannot kill the Raja or the Elephant in the room, that is Debian, the maestro!.

Linux Productivity Utilities

Linux has enormous pool of productivity tools.

I started with GIMP (now version 2.8 version) for manipulating photographs with rafter graphics.  

My main plan was to reduce the layering bulk and make a png file for Web transport.

It has many formats including jpg.
The pdf or the portable document format is light and has solved many of my problems.

The other utility was Open Office 1 to 3 (work with thesis was done on Open Office, Big Thank You) and later I transferred myself to Abiword for my book publishing. 

Abiword is built in command line format to begin with and it does not let you number the pages at lib.

 I have solved this little annoyance by opening the Abi file in Libre Office and numbering the pages. When I open it in Abi word it recognizes the page numbers and I position these precisely with Abiword.

Abiword Page Format is the best in current use.

Last few books I did with LibreOffice 7 as an experiment, since Abiword was only available in Emmabantus, then.

Currently Abiword 3.0.5 is available in Debian 12.4.0 and Ubuntu 24.10.

I am going back to Abiword in Debian in my next book.
 

That book is about a Ceylonese dog who lost his memory!

The BEST utility of Abiword is its ability to remove formatting when copying and in the last 2 years or so, the LibreOffice has also implemented copying without formatting.

That is the best way to kill Microsoft's buggy Macros with Viruses.

Now there are many other word processing utilities which include Only Office, Manuscript, Collabra, Callibra, Kate, LibreOffice, TyTex, Groof of BSD and the commercial Google and Microsoft words.

TyTex is like Latex and is a command line utility.

This is besides lot of NOTE taking applications that were developed for Android devices that are now adopted and ported by the Linux Community.

RedNote.
Gnote
Note and many more.

The utilities I rarely used are
1. Blender
2. Scribus
3. VM Ware Box and Virtual Box.

Multimedia
VLC
Audacity
Clementine
and many more

Video and Audio editors

These applications are bundled in one DVD and the rest not available can be downloaded from Software Store or Synaptic Software Center.

Debian 12.4.0 has integrated both Debian and Synaptic under one hood.

Even Ubuntu lately have followed suit and using Android utilities.

By the way, Android is Linux with a proprietary tag!

If one is not using Linux he or she is loosing a lot of money, time and resources.

Debian base has over 60,000 packages and up to 21 DVDs for installation.

There are also at least 8 Live DVDs with different desktops.

You are FREE to try and all what you need is a good Internet connection and at worst, a portable USB mounted Hard Disk.

You can carry all these in your pocket.

I use Intel NUC without a Fan.

I only carry couple of USB sticks with Puppy Linux, not an Immutable copy but a Persistent copy which is mounted on RAM and in an available space in a bootable partition (in the hard disk one uses).

If you install at least one SWAP partition (I use at least 3) temporary pages (not files) are swapped at run time.

The SWAP partition can be formatted without harming the distribution.

Microsoft uses only temporary files and pages and with no SWAP partition, the recovery of a big file is dicey!

That is why Microsoft has gone to the cloud for safety and recovery.

If the Internet breaks down with lot of Cyber guys operating now, having your own hard disk or portable disk is mandatory.

RAIDS and NAS need network connectivity.

I think I missed talking about various pdf editing utilities in Linux.