Kinda off-topic, but fine, here’s my poor man setup:
Going top to bottom there are:
Salusa: the pfSense Box
PS12: my PC running Manjaro and a Windows VM with hardware passthrough
The unlabeled one: an old PC running Windows 8.1
The last one (Truster) is an empty one, I need to mod it a little to mount a PSU inside it without it vibrating, because it had one with a reversed fan to draw air from the front and eject it over the top of the motherboard (not straight to the CPU, but over 2 trays that could hold 4 HDDs).
On the top here, you can see my Huawei ONT from my ISP and my Zyxel router that I put in bridge mode and only use as an AP.
Cable management is not my forte here, the only ones I managed (which can’t be seen well in the pictures) are my power cables coming from my UPSes, there are 3 cables well tied to the right leg going to each PC. The ones I couldn’t manage are the USB cables (I got 2 powered USB HUBs), network cables and HDMI cables. The keyboard and mouse are there because a game refuses to run without detecting them (I play with a controller). Some random stuff all over the rack (it’s a dual-purpose shelf) and at the bottom, my 2 APC UPSes keeping my TV, PS12, Salusa, ISP ONT and AP alive, with the last PC being just on power surge (cuz it sucks quite a bit of juice, even though it’s not that powerful, it’s just old). I use those on my TV that you can see a part of in the first picture. The servers are pretty silent, I sleep with them powered on, they are on 24/7 and until today, I had 129 days uptime on my pfSense box (I had to reboot, because I updated to version 2.4.5).
This is my ugly chair (I do wash the cover quite often) with the ikea Brada laptop stand (the mode in which I lay back).
This is the Lack that I made into a taller table, I can use it just like it is, because it is not so tall that I can’t reach it while in the chair (a slightly taller chair would have been nice though), but I can also move it and use it while standing, because it is tall enough that I don’t have to bend to use it.
As a side note related to the topic, wfh has been taking a toll on my sanity. And not because I like going out (I’d stay home at all times if I didn’t have to buy food and other stuff), but because I hate WFH. Sure, it’s good that I don’t “waste” 2h a day on my commute (it’s not a waste for me, as I love listening audiobooks on my way to work and back home, I haven’t listened a book in a while), but being able to concentrate in just 1 room (again, I live in a studio apartment) is really hard. The good part is that I never used the table for anything before, I just had it because I bought too many Lacks when I built my Rack, but it managed to be quite useful when working from home, because that desk is dedicated to work now and I try not to leave it too often, just change positions and sometimes stand, during the 8h of work (I do take breaks to hydrate and at most 1 break to eat).
@SgtAwesomesauce Thanks for the small review. Yes, I only use my current PC (the PS12 with Manjaro mentioned above) just for Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice Calc. It has 3GB dedicated to it (and 5GB to the Windows VM which is also powered on 24/7). A RPi4 would probably be enough for my needs, although I open quite a lot of tabs in Firefox, my usage is not too bad
I’m currently using Manjaro KDE in KWin_Wayland session, which uses around 1GB of RAM at boot. On a Pi I would probably just go back to JWM and if it works out ok on the Pi 4, Void Linux (I love Void with JWM on my RPi2, but that thing was struggling even with Kodi on YouTube, it was unusable). I would probably strip my 256 GB Adata XPG SX 8200pro (that Wendell reviewed, I bought it thanks to him) and buy an USB M.2 NVME enclosure for the Pi. Not sure if any other cheap SBCs would work fine with Manjaro or Void and be cheap enough. The Pi seems the most supported SBC, is cheap and doesn’t use a lot of power. For $100 I could probably buy an old laptop without a battery or screen and use that on my TV, but it would use more power than the Pi and be more than what I probably need for a browser, a mail client and a spreadsheet.