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!
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.