Congratulations, you are very funny. /s
I was actually considering something like “A new Raspberry Pi 5 is the best and most cost-effective option for my use case” to take advantage of Cunningham’s law.

Why Docker? I’m definitely not after scalability.
I don’t think the TV does either
Edit: it does! I tested with the existing satellite STB (which I’ll be replacing with IPTV for cost reasons) but the only feature it can do is turn the source on/off, it does not pass the 0-9 or P+/P- key presses to it when in HDMI mode - it switches to the now useless analog tuner when any of them are pressed. Either way, I have a universal remote that I can program to send different codes for 0-9 and P+/P-, so that they are only interpreted by the USB IR receiver I install and not the TV.
Most MoBos allow programmatic fan control too, right?
I’m OK with a fan running when the HDD is spinning. To save power, a SSD can perhaps be used as a cache to minimize HDD usage time during file transfers over LAN or torrent.
Fujitsu Futro S740
Now that’s a good recommendation. I didn’t find any for sale around here but I can get an HP T530 that also idles below 10 W for 35 €. I’d need to buy an HDMI-DP adapter, plus an M.2 SSD or a wireless module (they use the same slot and there’s just one), the other would need to be a USB peripheral.
All the use cases I need are well-documented on ARM by the RPi community. What issues do you think I’d encounter?
plenty of useful IO
It’s not that old or professional, unfortunately. It was a budget 15.6" one I got from a relative. Only two USB ports (one is 3.0), Ethernet, HDMI, headphone jack and DVD±RW drive. It’s underwhelming but not that I need much more. It can’t even do 4K but the TV is 1366x768 so that’s OK too.
The device will run 100% of the time as a torrent client and NAS so I don’t really need to solve the power-on issue, long unplanned outages are rare and I can probably bridge the short ones by going low power and waking up every hour.
I already have two USB adapters for SATA, they just require Molex connectors so I need an entire ATX PSU right now to power the drive. They will be enough to get the setup going before I measure how much power I actually need and solder an appropriate 12V and 5V supply to the cable.
I have an old laptop that is used as an HTPC but not much anymore. It runs Lubuntu alright but it needs an upgrade to an SSD. I think I’ll shell out a little extra for 512 GB rather than some 64-128 GB the Linux+software install needs, so I can cache media there and reduce the HDD utilization. A hack will be required to bypass the lack of “power on AC” in the BIOS, probably removing the lid magnets and wiring the power switch to an Arduino or something to facilitate a restart after a power outage (long unplanned outages are rare though so I might get away without that right now). The idle power usage will be some 10 W but I can live with that.
I wonder if there is an advanced BitTorrent client that can import my extensive qBittorrent library and respond to supply/demand while minimizing the HDD’s duty cycle… for example refusing to spin it up just to seed public or overseeded torrents, and only spinning it up to copy the contents to SSD for files that are on demand, or write completed downloads from SSD to HDD.
USB-C definitely can handle a 768p monitor plus playing video from disk and 100Mbit Ethernet, it’s just that most phones under my 100 € budget (cut short by the dongle) don’t even have 2.0 OTG capabilities because they’re basic ones for seniors. The only hope to get a discount on the good ones are those with a semi-busted screen but I’m not relying on that to install Linux.
The Raspberry fits in the budget, and there is a guy selling one for 40 € but he’s not responded yet…
Also what’s the problem with the battery? It still lasts an hour with the screen on so it’s not trash yet… I’m into electronics and repurpose old Li-Ion cells all the time, including 15 year old Nokia BL-5Cs and they’re alright, they don’t spontaneously develop shorts and are protected against electrical abuse. It’s the alkaline cells that cause havoc (corrosion) if left unused for years. If need be, I can just replace individual cells (I think they are 18650) from a power tool found in trash. Of course, I would get rid of bulging or overheating cells if I encountered them.
It’s around 3x the budget, which is a greater dealbreaker than a USB3.0-SATA adapter plus 12V source, all of which I already own.
Also, the R1 name sounds too AI-y to me (Rabbit, DeepSeek) but that’s not really relevant.
Je to jenom jedna stránka z dokumentu o promoakci, kdoví, kdo to dělal. Ale podle nízkého rozlišení se jedná o masový deployment a ne hlavní pracovní počítač někoho moc nahoře: ten by asi taky dokázal sešít PDFka.