I currently have 2 VM's running on my RPi4-8GB. 1 VM is doing pihole, is 0.384GB RAM, 6GB storagespace. I had 5 VMs running earlier, managed the whole house.I've considered getting a VM for my Mac mini.
The mini has a 500 GB SSD with about 70 GB occupied. The computer has 8GB of RAM.
The host (my mini) requires some RAM. I don't know how much SSD space to allocate - 50 GB, 100 GB?
Is 8GB enough RAM to split between the host & the VM?
Of course that pihole is 'virtual headless', only CLI based so no graphics installs. Is actually less than 1GB occupied from that 6GB. So it depends what you want to do. If your MACmini is ARM based, so M1 SoC for example, it is much faster than a RPi5.
So maybe tell what you want. Or do you just want to buy something. Or just want to have Linux. Pi is cheap, but I won't be surprised that you will go through quite some frustration. Cheap means a lot of DIY. Even people who build computers themselves are challenged and it doesn't look like you ever build a computer yourself. If you want small, than don't buy a keyboard with computer inside. Look at FriendlyElec maybe, they have boxes not much bigger than the connectors plugged into it.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Tue Dec 30, 2025 10:35 am