I picked up an ASRock NUC BOX-225H (they have a 255H I wanted but out of stock) which might be a better alternative depending on storage needs and sensitivity to price.

(Progress Quest is awesome)

Excellent choice. Have several of them too, with either i5-7500T or i7-7700T, with small 65W or 90W power-bricks. With 32GB RAM each. With that even the 7500's are more than enough for my browsing needs. Didn't see the need to rack them, though. I've put four of them on the back of my desk edgewise, under one of my screens, with an old routerthing running OpenWRT on top of them, connected with short patch cables on the back, out of sight. Stable and cat-proof.

Even with the powersave governor pushing them down to 800Mhz they stay snappy, and rarely go above 1.2GHz, except when I compile stuff, or do logic-simulations. But I have other, more modern stuff for that. OTOH with things like distcc/Icecream they can be useful helpers.

Edit: Suspend to RAM/wakeup (via whichever mechanism(even via keycombo or special key on modern Keyboard)), WOL, NetBoot/PXE works every single time.

4K video? No problem.

Hackintosh? Check. But why? There's QEMU. (Am not a Mac person anyways)

Genode? Check. Much more interesting running native/bare metal.

The quality of the BIOS/UEFI is phenomenal, like Thinkpad legendary.

In 2010 I built a small HTPC[1] in an Antec ISK300-150[2]. Started out with 500GB HDD + 8GB RAM, then replaced with 2TB SSD, then added another 4TB SSD and another 8GB of RAM recently. Started out TV-connected, but for years now it's been running Ubuntu headlessly in my basement, hosting containers, automations, TimeMachines, etc. Not sure if you'd call it a homelab. Wonder what do people do with their multi-PC racks that can't be done with one small machine like this? (besides running LLMs of course)

[1]: https://notes.max.engineer/htpc-hardware-specs

[2]: https://www.antec.com/product/case/isk300-150

Have a few Tinys for when I worked on OpenStack. They are now used as a router, and desktop and thinclient, for a lot more recent Tiny that runs a few VMs/containers for the homelab. Easy to get spare parts for and reliable. Do check if they accept internal (mini)PCIe devices if you want to add a network adapter, as some are whitelisted to only take some certified wifi devices.

I've never gotten the obsession with patch panels and small (laminar) patch cables on server racks. It seems to make more sense just to mount the switches on the back of the rack, and run the cables directly? And then cables leading off the rack can just go directly from the switch (appropriately labeled)

I do totally get it for building wiring, where the patch panel is used to bulk terminate cables going elsewhere into fixed 2-post racks, and the patch cords take care of the higher level concern of assigning switch ports. But doing it on a home server rack just feels like cargo cult copying that pattern for not much gain.

Old Chromeboxen from eBay. Mr. Chromebox UEFI[1].

I did this before the pandemic for a "real" K8s environment (history is 20/20, but this rocked for what I needed then).

Basically a super inexpensive and tiny i7-4600U laptops w/o display that I upgraded to 16GB of RAM and 256 SSDs. I still run a smaller fleet for different services and testing - both standalone and as part of a Proxmox cluster.

I donated to Mr. Chromebox for years, super awesome work.

[1]: https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/