Apologies if this post ain’t right for this community! I’m admittedly not interested in self-hosting myself, but I’ve a close buddy who’s wanting to get back to streaming, but rightfully hates Amazon. He’s wanting to self-host with Owncast to do video streaming with his pals, but lives in a very small flat with very little free space - hence the request for a laptop.
Ideally he’s needing something great for video encoding, and Linux friendly to boot. No Windows. Mate’s got a budget of ~£1,000.
If there’s a better community for this lemme know!
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Is he planning to also use the laptop as a laptop?
If not, there are small form factor PCs (especially if you’re willing to buy used business stuff) that don’t take up a lot of space that can be good options. Laptops have some features that are kind of nice on a server as well (the battery becomes a backup against power outages and you don’t need to remote access or plug stuff in to use it because it has a built in display and keyboard), but I don’t think they’re so nice that it’s usually worth buying a laptop just for that purpose. It’s more a reason that repurposing an old one makes sense. If you’re willing to pay the premium a new laptop adds, you can get some pretty low profile units.
He’s just using it for streaming, figured it having a built in screen would help significantly with the limited space in his flat.
Go on Kijiji or whatever and look for a relatively recent used one with an Intel processor. It’ll be a lot cheaper, and you don’t need fancy hardware or features since you’ll not be using it as a laptop.
Ideally he’s needing something great for video encoding, and Linux friendly to boot.
What’s the plan here, using the laptop for gaming and streaming, or only using the laptop as the streaming machine?
Just using it as a streaming machine.