CCMan1701A

It's more that my daily life tasks have no use for AI agents or llms. I have dabbled with running local llms and agents, but idk yet, just haven't gotten enough out of it that it seems worth it.

This is how skynet gets everyone that isn't polite to AI.

Same

I see a ton of i5-8th gen 2-in-1s with dead batteries, but under 100 on ebay

Just look at the processors in the Synology offerings, you didn't need much to run a bunch of services.

I got my kid a used dell that was $90 on eBay and it's running linux just fine with the 8th Gen i5. If you need more you can likely just spend 100 more. I have a hard time justification for new unless you have a need for specific hardware

I have been playing with Incus recently.

You can run Windows in vms on Linux if you don't need screaming performance. I think you can directly install from iso with Incus as well. I haven't find this yet, i used Qemu instead.

You could spin up a vm with mx and see how it works.

Will do. I think Asus stopped sending fw updates so I'm hoping to get a few more years out of this unit.

I'm running an older Asus router they is listed on the OpenWrt site. Would it be the most affordable option to just install open wrt on this device and manually bring over my current configs?

SimTower. I have spent too much time there