After sailing for almost my entire life, i pulled the trigger last year on a boat and bought myself an awesome 34ft boat, docked on the east coast of sweden here
Now I am lucky enough that I am a programmer and thus can work remotely, as long as I can use citrix and remote into my beefy office PC
Which then naturally, made me think that I would like to build a PC setup where I can work on from the boat
So the question then becomes: What is the smallest most lightweight (in terms of power consumption) PC out there I can buy, that I can then use to install endeavour os + i3wm on and work on?
Requirements:
Wifi or ethernet connectivity so I can get it routed through my 5G router
Endeavour OS + i3wm (or preferrably gnome or Cosmic DE) support
Can drive 1 full HD 1080p monitor with Citrix running full screen without struggling
Supports running firefox + webcam + headphones port so I can take meetings
No need for too much storage space, just enough to install the OS and apps (citrix client + kitty + gvim + firefox)
I dont need to play games on it, or do 10 things at once, even watch full 4k videos. Just the thinnest client that can handle the above
If you were building this setup, or buying it, what would you go for?
Fellow sailor here. Congrats on the new boat! If you live aboard, I hope you have a decent shore power connection or a powerful heater in the cabin.
Definitely a lot of low-power Pi-based setups on boats out there. No reason you can’t run all the things you mention on a low-power setup. Personally, I love WMs rather than full DEs because I don’t need dancing menus and singing icons.
However I think once you have a CPU on board, you’ll want to take advantage of all the things you can do with it on your sailboat. Lots of instrumentation is going WiFi such as charts, GPS, windex, comms, temps, etc. Also, your connectivity to cell towers is likely to be spotty when you are away from urban areas, so some form of cell connection management is a must. This guy has a mega-setup but it’s only one way to hook the pieces together. If I had to do it over on our boat, I’d skip the WiFi and go straight to cellular.
May I suggest looking at BareboatNecessities, a Linux-based boating distro? If that’s too heavy, maybe start with OpenCPN on i3 and go from there. I think you’ll find a good balance between low power draw, throughput, and performance.
Nothing to contribute at all to this thread except to say I’m stunned, this would be my dream job. Just to clarify, at sea you are not near people, correct?
makes me wonder if OP needs two tiny PCs --one as back up. the stuff you describe seems so life and death critical. are backups common for any electronics for sailors? Asking OP as well.
@drunkenvicar, yeah, backups are a great idea and most folks have one, like a cell phone with boating charts on it, or a tablet of some kind with the same. I’m old school and I learned navigation on paper charts, taking sightings, doing dead reckoning, etc. and I always have a paper chart open. It’s a lot easier to see areas at a glance than by scrolling/ dragging/ zooming about on a touch screen.
It is pretty sweet living on a boat and working remotely. If you’re near people, just pull up the anchor and move to where there aren’t any. I’m now land-bound but it was definitely great times.
The caveat, and it’s a big one, is that much of your non-sailing time is taken up with maintenance and repair, much more than a home on land. As the joke says, boating is all about learning to do expensive maintenance in exotic locations. If you don’t know about engine repair and troubleshooting electrical and plumbing, you will.
