I got my hands on a Lenovo ThinkSmart Hub 500 - you may have seen these in conference rooms, its a small Teams Room or Zoom Room device, based off their Tiny lineup, with a built-in touch display thats about 11" in diagonal.
https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkSmart/ThinkSmart_Hub_500/ThinkSmart_Hub_500_Spec.pdf
I left the 128gb nvme in there for now, and threw Debian 12 on it. Touch worked throughout the installation process, all I did was attach a keyboard, power, and network (along with the thumb drive with netinstall), now installed with KDE.
Considering the specs, the only part I'm surprised works well is the touchscreen, its otherwise just a generic lenovo tiny (which I have several of already, 6th-9th gen, as part of my tiny/mini/micro server stack). I could have chosen a different flavor, but I'm a long, long, loooonngggg time Debain user so its my go-to.
In terms of touch, tap, drag, and long press are all working. Video looks good with the UI set at 125% scaling, and to be candid its rather snappy and responsive.
I did this 100% for my own personal entertainment, so now for some thoughts for the community - what would be fun to use it for? A few of my thoughts....
- I could use it as a HomeAssistant kiosk. Neat, but.... overkill compared to the tablets doing the same job.
- Make it an emulation station, attach my steam controller and maybe my usb adapters for N64/GC/Sega/PS/etc.
- Use it to test a series of distributions to see how well they handle touch drivers for this silly thing (EndeavorOS is probably going to happen, I may be a long time Debian guy but I should spend more regular time in other things, and not just my arch VMs).
- I don't know, gcompris for my kids? They already have it though on an android tablet and an old mac mini (like, 2011ish) hooked up to the TV in the living room.
- Make it another proxmox endpoint for the cluster, install a DE anyway, and then let it be an always-visible display for grafana?
- Install OBS, let the hdmi capture have some purpose?
What about you folks, what would you find fun to do with this box?
I dont consider Black Friday to be of much value, its usually garbage thats been repackaged,or priced up just before to go down for black Friday/cyber Monday.
That said, I dont spend anywhere near that much on drives per tb, and I dont do used. I'm also not looking for quiet though, the HP 2920 in the rack is much louder than any drive is going to be, so if its the right price for your needs, I'd just go for it. I'd base on $/TB though, and I wouldn't be waiting for November, just the right price.