I’ve been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is… delicious!

I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).

So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).

Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?

Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.

  • @damnthefilibusterOPEnglish
    2•10 months ago

    Thanks! I think I’m gonna go for the N5105. I was looking at the spec diff between that and the N100 and though the N100 has more processing power, it seems the N5105 has better GPU for less price. Strange.

    • manitcorEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      It’s always those details. I want the gpu so I can do transcoding of new files. Is you don’t need a gpu go for the 100

      • @damnthefilibusterOPEnglish
        2•10 months ago

        definitely considering transcoding as an option. Even if I use it for the github runner work, some of the data pipelines use puppeteer and Chrome, which needs a GPU for nicely rendering CSS. So I think the 5105 is the better bet… :)