MangoPenguin

The downside is price, they're quite expensive after buying the Pi, storage, power supply, and maybe a case.

I wonder how the co2 from drying/making bricks compares

Newer CPUs can also just be better optimized and have more faster cache and that sort of thing, so might be faster at running a process even if they're the same on paper.

It's likely switching which search engines it's using in the background, since searxng is a proxy to multiple existing search engines.

You can specify which search engines to use in your user settings, so you could restrict it to only one.

That said they could just be broken too, none of the searxng instances I just tried return valid search results, just random broken results.

I'd say start with Bazzite and see how it is, it generally just works well out of the box and needs minimal effort.

Those old server CPUs and motherboards just draw a ton of power, I'm not sure there's much more you can do.

It might be best to change hardware if you need lower power draw, a $50 PC off ebay with an i5-7500 should be faster and a only uses about 15W idle.

That N200 is likely on par or faster than dual Opteron 6272 CPUs, since they are so old.

Yup, this is just saying 510mA in a weird way

Essentially a container shares the kernel of the host, so uses less resources to run.

VMs are useful when you need more isolation or a different kernel (or need to add kernel modules).

For most purposes containers are the easy option.

I guess I could have a Container with a bind mount to a dataset that I want to be able to share over NFS or SMB, and handle that from whatever OS I put in the Container, right?

Yep!

But, I could also have a VM do that, and though it wouldn’t be able to share the data with other VMs, it can do it over NFS, can’t it?

Also yes, just a more complex setup with more performance penalty due to using NFS to share data into the VM.

You wouldn't want to write to the same file at the same time, but otherwise it works fine.

That's almost worse, Asus also makes a lot of garbage.

That makes sense.

While windows doing a bunch of IO is silly and probably could be more efficient, it sounds like the blame is the SSD controllers crapping out when asked to do exactly what they advertise they are supposed to do (high throughput IO).