> And likewise maybe more people have a PC-type device than before, but still represent a smaller fraction. I take heart in this.
I also question this whenever I see that "people mostly use locked-down devices now". But I don't have any numbers; honestly it wouldn't surprise me to be wrong.
> Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement
Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-datacenter in their house – and therefore there being more computers out there – doesn't mean that there are more distinct people whose main computing device is a general-purpose computer.
To me, the people interested in the home lab movement are those who already were interested in doing "more" with computers, as opposed to just "consuming recommended content".
I know it's my case and I do it now because computers are cheaper, and it's easier to find quiet ones.
> Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-datacenter in their house – and therefore there being more computers out there – doesn't mean that there are more distinct people whose main computing device is a general-purpose computer.
I've always done this even when I didn't have a lot of money. Server hardware has always been cheap because most of its audience won't even think about buying it secondhand, they will only buy new with warranty and 4hr support. I got $400 fibre channel cards for $10 because literally nobody wants them and companies throw out perfectly good cards when the warranty expires. It's a joke.
In the early 2000's I had Sun Fire and Netra's. I had an HP 9000 HP-UX box with 1GB (in the day when that was a ridiculous amount of memory). These days I have HPs.
A home lab has always been within reach. In fact I find it harder now due to energy consumption, as energy was always cheap.
Maybe I didn't know where to look in the early 2000s, but I do find it much easier now. Basically all of my home lab is what my work was going to throw away – so free.
However, the biggest issue to me, up until very recently, was noise. I have a ~4-year-old Lenovo Think Server that is quieter than some laptops. I also have my eye on a somewhat older HP rack-mount server that is also extremely quiet and should be decommissioned soon.
But up until around 2010, a rack-mount server would have driven me insane. Ditto for switches. Around 2012 I first saw a then-new HP model that was fanless. But it only did 100 Mbps, all the gigabit models came with a jet-engine attached. Now I managed to find a fanless Gigabit Ruckus with a few 10G ports, since they start to be old enough.
Throwaways from work were one major source of my home lab too. However for me this has become a lot harder in recent years, because our company scrapped its own datacenters and moved to the cloud. A hallway full of decommissioned servers is now extremely rare. We have some "computer rooms" left (not allowed to call them "datacenters" anymore) but it's just for the stuff that really must be on-site.
Other than that, online marketplaces. Not eBay generally, because its auction system and international reach drives prices up, even for items which normally gather low interest. I tend to use local buy & sell websites where people usually offer lower prices than advertised and these kinds of items are not very popular so they tend to go cheap.
I've never seen fanless servers, but my home lab is not something I keep running 24/7 anyway. And it sits in a dedicated room with my 3D printers and electronics workbench so it's not the kind of place I hang out for peace and quiet anyway :) It's my mancave really (though, for lack of a partner, right now my whole apartment is a mancave :) ).
My 24/7 stuff I do pick for energy-efficiency and to a much smaller extent, noise. I have 4 NUCs for this stuff. 2 nice ones with 4/6 cores and 64GB RAM, and 2 ancient ones (one atom and one skylake IIRC) which are very low power though. They're the ones that keep running when everything switches to UPS.
I'm not really big into networking so I have some semi-managed TP-Links that bought new for 35 bucks. They're gigabit, 8 ports and can do basic stuff like vlans and mirroring which is all I need. I'm not doing any CCNA stuff or anything.
I also question this whenever I see that "people mostly use locked-down devices now". But I don't have any numbers; honestly it wouldn't surprise me to be wrong.
> Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement
Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-datacenter in their house – and therefore there being more computers out there – doesn't mean that there are more distinct people whose main computing device is a general-purpose computer.
To me, the people interested in the home lab movement are those who already were interested in doing "more" with computers, as opposed to just "consuming recommended content".
I know it's my case and I do it now because computers are cheaper, and it's easier to find quiet ones.