With billions of batteries in use there are going to be plenty of complaints about issues. My specific experience is with an ancient Dell Venue convertible that's been in regular use for 9 years with charge limiting applied that entire time. The battery still looks new and for what it's worth, Dell's UEFI reports it's in excellent condition. This while the rest of the system including the charging port is completely worn out and at the end of its useful life. That computer is running Debian 12, HA and Frigate with only 4gb of ram and (outside the physical problems of a very old, heavily used laptop) is working fine.

Are the computers you have bought from Aliexpress UL listed, or do they have a European safety listing? I've read reports of some equipment and appliances sold by Chinese companies on various sites (including Amazon) causing fires. Not that those mean that much though. Even my UL listed Cyberpower UPS has had reports of internal shorts and fires.

There are literally billions of lithium batteries in use and you have a better chance of being struck by lightning that having a lithium battery fire. Your concern about the battery life isn't realistic either. These batteries last for many years when the charge is limited to less than 100% and can be replaced when they finally wear out. If you run a UPS you'll eventually need to replace those batteries too and your backup time will be usually be measured in minutes rather than hours.

As far as the ram limitation is concerned, it's plenty for a supported Home Assistant installation and that's exactly what this post is about.

Every machine has advantages and disadvantages, but I'm not sure why having a screen and a battery fall into the disadvantage category. The Aliexpress machines have some serious disadvantages including fans and an almost complete lack of support for most of them. And long-term support is a fantasy.

Dell sucks in many ways, but their support is in English and they produce firmware updates for several years after a product is released, especially for machines used by enterprise customers like this one.

Besides, if you add a UPS (and they all have batteries) to any of those Aliexpress mini PC's you're well over the price for this machine even with a gigabit Ethernet adapter.

For me $70 extra for a silent system with display, keyboard, UPS, a real warranty, and long-term support is a bargain.

Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!

I've found it to be simpler. Booting off a USB SSD allows full disk cloning to that same SSD without worrying about mounted partitions or using a separate USB thumb drive for Clonezilla. Once booted I can access the machine through SSH or NoMachine to create the backup and it is far faster than backing up to a network drive. For incremental backups Timeshift works fine.

The screen and keyboard are invaluable for backups. I have a portable SSD with Ubuntu installed for creating backups, but I often have to manually set the boot device on startup to get it to work. Setting a USB SSD for the first boot device in the BIOS/UEFI doesn't seem to work reliably on any of my systems.

The point of a UPS or equivalent is to protect the SSD during a power failure. I've lost Raspberry Pi configurations several times due to power failures when I'm away from the house. It has been a major PITA and time consuming to recover from.

The one I have draws about 6 watts when running Home Assistant which means at $0.25 per KWH it would cost $1.10 per month to run. Just adding a UPS to any other platform is going to cost more per month and have a much shorter run time.

I just checked and Reddit did the same with my account. I spent hours editing and ultimately deleting my posts and comments, and the Spez Gestapo just undeleted years worth of content. I'm going to go through them again and this time I'll leave the gibberish.

Not the first time. I thought a Windows 10 update wiped grub, but Microsoft actually deleted my entire Linux partition. Others have experienced the same thing.

Windows is required for a couple of apps I need with no alternatives, but the only way it runs on any of my computers is in a VM.

I have mine behind a Pihole too. It blocked all the ads at first but Roku seems to actively varying the ad servers and they've started showing up again. I haven't had a chance to see if I can block them again.

Could be a bad board. I have a Pi 3B+ that intermittently crashes and shows insufficient voltage no matter what power supply is used.

Roku is chocked full of ads too, and regularly sets the default for the "Select" button to open those ad sites or apps. Roku used to be great. It has now been completely enshittified.