Hardware

Install Windows first. Then install Linux with systemd-boot as the bootloader on a shared EFI System Partition. Add a dedicated exFAT partition for cross-OS file sharing. This setup avoids the classic problem of Windows Update wiping out GRUB , since systemd-boot entries sit next to Windows Boot Manager in the ESP without a fight. Both systems read and write exFAT out of the box, with no risk of corruption.

Got a Lunar Lake laptop and went looking for Intel’s Arc Control app on Linux? It doesn’t exist. Intel only ships Arc Control for Windows. Linux users get a community tool instead: LACT , the Linux GPU Configuration and Monitoring Tool. It covers temperature, power limits, clock speeds, and voltage through a proper GUI. For live performance data, intel_gpu_top and nvtop handle the rest from the terminal.

Below: driver setup, LACT installation, CLI monitoring tools, power tuning, and the most common things that go wrong on a fresh install.

You can run DeepSeek R1 ’s distilled reasoning models on an RTX 5080 with 16 GB of VRAM. Use Ollama or llama.cpp with 4-bit quantization. The 14B distilled variant (Q4_K_M) fits in about 10 GB of VRAM. It shows visible <think> reasoning traces that rival cloud quality on math, coding, and logic. The full 671B model needs multi-GPU rigs, but the distilled models give you 80-90% of the quality for far less hardware.

You can stream live vehicle diagnostics and GPS location to Home Assistant by pairing a Bluetooth Low Energy OBD-II adapter with an ESPHome -based BLE proxy or a dedicated Android device running Torque Pro . This setup feeds real-time fuel economy, engine codes, coolant temperature, and GPS coordinates into Home Assistant entities, enabling geo-fenced automations like opening your garage door on arrival or logging trip fuel costs - all without any cloud dependency.

If you are building a home lab in 2026, the most consequential decision you will make is what hardware to run it on. Rack servers are loud, power-hungry, and overkill for most people. A Raspberry Pi cluster is fun but constrained. The sweet spot - and has been for the last couple of years - is the mini PC.

The market has matured. You now have three distinct tiers worth considering: Intel N150 machines for single-purpose appliances, Intel N305 machines for general-purpose home labs, and AMD Ryzen AI class mini PCs for heavy virtualization or local AI inference. Each tier makes sense for a different type of user, and the wrong pick will either leave you frustrated with underpowered hardware or paying for capabilities you will never use.

Running Home Assistant OS (HAOS) inside a Proxmox VE virtual machine gives you the full, officially supported installation - add-ons, Supervisor, automatic updates - while sharing hardware with other VMs and containers. On a modest Intel N305 mini PC, you can run HAOS alongside Plex, Vaultwarden, Nextcloud, and a WireGuard VPN with room to spare. The entire setup takes under 30 minutes. Download the HAOS QCOW2 image, create a VM in Proxmox, import the disk, boot, and you are up and running.