I'm using my old Dell PC with 24 GB of RAM as my Linux server. I flashed it with Linux. I can still switch back to Windows by changing the boot preference, so I have both.
I used to run my server on a cloud service, but I don't like paying $20 a month for 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM, and 80 GB of storage.
I know the usual questions: what about maintenance, and managing the server? Fine, a shared server.
Okay, I get it. Maintaining a server is hard. That was true before AI. Now we have AI sitting in the brains of VMs (Linux servers), and we can solve most problems that come up. I'm honestly hoping I get a problem to solve on this machine.
This laptop is old. Best Buy gave it a trade-in value of $54. I figured it was more useful if I moved my services off a cloud provider and onto hardware I already own.
Now this Linux machine is my server, and I'm running different things on it. All of my services. A voice agent. An on-prem LLM with Ollama (Gemma 2 2B).
I was able to set the battery to auto shut off at 80% so it lasts longer.
It was fun.