Oddbean

I enjoyed this talk. Decided to wipe an older laptop and install StartOS and a Bitcoin Core Node. Syncing right now. It is a very different feel to my pieced together node. I don’t know how much I like it, yet. Lots out of my direct control, but that may become a good thing. I will give it some time. And I will check out other services from the marketplace. I am hopeful that I will eventually love it!

As a fan of arm SBC, my main worries are energy consumption and proprietary BIOS. Even though coreboot has its blobs, it makes power efficiency better around 20-30%. Pine64 sells a risc-v SBC. Still early but my bet for the "perfect" server is a risc-v SBC with two nvme s2 native support.

Ultimately, it looks like a stripped down Debian build. BIOS is for their proprietary systems; my laptop still has its BIOS after the install. There appears to be limited hardware recognition (including wifi adapters). I haven’t dug into it much to this point, and trust the Start9 team based on my limited trust circle. But I could dive into it if I had time. I like SBCs too. Although I don’t have any RISC-V ones at this point, but I could check it out on an ARM SBC at some point. I use the laptop because it was unused, has sufficient tech, has a decent battery, and other laptop benefits.

IMO it's the best node package. Their documention is also incredibly well written. I'm considering running another machines with StartOS. One for Bitcoin and one for non-bitcoin services. I'm glad that clearnet access is going to be improved and released soon.