I got a Mac Mini

[Joelist]

I recently put my home office on a base model M2Pro Mac Mini. And this thing is a REALLY good performer in the daily driver tasks I am using it for. The 512GB is plenty for storage and contrary to some tech bloggers the "Speed difference" is not noticeable. Plenty of ports and of course with my Studio Display it is plug and play with no calibration or anything needed. Setup took about 10 minutes between plugging things in and the OS startup.

 

[Colstan]

Congratulation! I hope you enjoy your new mini Mac. As someone who has a fetish for small computers, I can appreciate the enjoyment of getting a new one. I'm currently on my fourth Mac mini (they're the only Macs that I've owned). It's a lowly 2018 base model with a puny Core i3, 4-cores and non-HT. When I purchased it, I had meant for it to be a two-year "stopgap" until the Apple Silicon models were released, since the rumors of an Arm switch were strong back in 2018.

I'm now on year five of those two years, having upgraded the RAM to 64GB, added an eGPU, and use an external SSD to supplement the pathetic 128GB internal storage. Essentially, it's being held together with sticks, bubble gum, and unicorn prayers. The eGPU's fan is starting to make random "chirping" sounds and my 21.5-inch LG UltraFine is now showing the infamous pink discoloring around the screen borders, which have plagued iMacs and LG monitors from that era.

Since I built my first PC when I was a teenager, I've essentially had a "Ship of Theseus" computer, where various parts were inherited from previous builds. However, I've essentially run everything into the ground, and for the first time since I was a young teen, my next computer is going to be entirely new; keyboard, monitor, speakers, even the power strip needs to go.

Exactly what I'll be replacing it with, I'm not certain, but given my penchant for small computers, it'll likely either be a M(x) Pro Mac mini or a M(x) Max Mac Studio with upgraded graphics. I'm hoping that Apple will have a more advanced display for mainstream users in the future, such as mini-LED or OLED, but Apple's display updates are less frequent.

Regardless, I hope you enjoy your new box @Joelist! I'm envious, I realize that I'll eventually have to bite the bullet and make a purchase, I fully admit that I'm dragging this out as long as possible, and can't do it forever. Whichever Mac I do replace it with is going to blow this old one out of the water, it won't even be close, and make my current Mac mini look like a quaint museum piece from a bygone era.

 

[Nycturne]

Whichever Mac I do replace it with is going to blow this old one out of the water, it won't even be close, and make my current Mac mini look like a quaint museum piece from a bygone era.

It will be a few years before I can truly ditch my Intel Mini I think. I still have a couple VMs that I haven't found a good way to migrate just yet because they are Windows based or rely on DOS emulation that itself relies on x86 Linux.

 

[mr_roboto]

It will be a few years before I can truly ditch my Intel Mini I think. I still have a couple VMs that I haven't found a good way to migrate just yet because they are Windows based or rely on DOS emulation that itself relies on x86 Linux.

Have you been able to try the Windows stuff in Windows on Arm under Parallels? Microsoft supposedly has a decent-ish x86 emulator built into it, so it may work well enough for you eventually. No personal experience with it though.

As for DOS, it sounds like you have an entire x86 VM with some bits that run in DOS emu to migrate? I know that DOSBox and possibly other DOS emulators have macOS builds, so if the entire thing you need is in DOS you could potentially move that. There's also the Rosetta-in-Linux-VM thing which Apple enabled recently; I don't think that's been made super easy to use yet but it's out there.

 

[Nycturne]

Have you been able to try the Windows stuff in Windows on Arm under Parallels? Microsoft supposedly has a decent-ish x86 emulator built into it, so it may work well enough for you eventually. No personal experience with it though.

It’s mostly getting the time and energy to go through the whole setup of a Windows VM to experiment with what works. I can spin up Ubuntu with docker in minutes, but getting Windows to act like a small server is more troublesome.

As for DOS, it sounds like you have an entire x86 VM with some bits that run in DOS emu to migrate? I know that DOSBox and possibly other DOS emulators have macOS builds, so if the entire thing you need is in DOS you could potentially move that. There's also the Rosetta-in-Linux-VM thing which Apple enabled recently; I don't think that's been made super easy to use yet but it's out there.

The VM is under Ubuntu, and I wasn’t able to figure out how to run DOSBox in a way that both keeps the calling BBS happy, and doesn’t throw a fit because there’s no X11 instance present to attach to. Even when I added X11 it wasn’t super happy with things.

It’s a bit more esoteric, as it’s using dosemu2 to run old BBS doors, but it works quite well on intel now that I have it properly setup. It was a trip getting that far along though. These old things are pretty creaky as it is and relies on dosemu2 re-routing a COM port to stdin/stdout for the Linux-based BBS to interact with.

For Rosetta-in-Linux, the virtualization tool needs to enable support for it. Everything I do lives in VMWare at the moment, and Parallels doesn’t enable it either. So another thing I’d have to research who supports it to even try it.

I’d love to be able to ditch the Intel system as it currently uses 40W under light load of the VMs it carries, while the M1 is less than half that.