Hestia is the world's most powerful supercomputer that doesn't exist. It's a computer in my head that I'd love to build but never will. Why is that? Because we have three cats, a dog, and a parrot. That's enough pet dander that I don't think a supercomputer would survive more than a week before you're pulling wads of fuzz out of power supplies. Also, the electrostatic discharge after petting a cat is probably not good for the RAM.
Instead, Hestia is just the minimum computer I need to get what the family needs done. They want to print? It's a printer hooked up to a router. They want to play music? It's an Apple HomePod Mini hooked up to a router. They want to play old video games? It's a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a TV. They want to see the recipe to butter chicken while they're cooking? Then it's just that big TV and a Chromecast.
Right now Hestia is all of these things, so Hestia is really just a big TV most of the time. It's always best to build the least you need to get every job done. I've done overbuilding before and it's a surefire way to end up with a lot of scrap metal and buyers remorse.
Hestia is a workstation, for all kinds of work.
A workstation is where I work, so I've got plenty to say about that. I get my work done on whatever these days, so I'm not too fussy. Hestia isn't built yet but I can imagine it, and it's going to have parts like:
A big Sanus TV wallmount
A 77" Samsung OLED TV
A Sonnet Echo 13 Thunderbolt dock
On the dock I have this connected:
Whatever printer I happen to discover
An Alesis Melody 61 MIDI keyboard
Whatever Thunderbolt or USB4 device happens to be nearby
And that's about the size of it really. The various residents of Johnson Manor will just swing by with whatever phone, tablet, or "Thingy that has a USB-C shaped port on the bottom of it" and jack in here. That way when we don't want to go look for our glasses we can stare at a big ass TV instead and not worry about it too much. I just happen to be heavily into music and book production, which explains the keyboard and bass guitar. The screen is also really nice for reading PDF books. I also do a bit of programming in my spare time and having a lot of screen works really well when you're doing that.
Never run out of screen, it's the worst thing...
Then there's Hestia remote - and this is where most of the magic happens because the butt end of the imaginary supercomputer is just something hanging out there in the cloud. I'm a firm believer that the best place to do your processing is in the cloud, and the more processing you do per byte of data the better it is to do it in the cloud. Data transmission is expensive and slow, but if you're grinding away 4,000 CPUs on a kilobyte of data then it's well worth it to just let an Amazon datacentre do that for you. I love screwdrivers but I also like for my work to get done before the computer breaks.
Oh, and did I explain the pet dander situation? Ah, yes.
I used to compile software on a computer I called MainFrame, but these days connections are so fast that I really can't justify owning a computer to write software on. Source code is, what? Less than a megabyte unless you're working on something really big, but by then you have a software team working on it. For what I'm doing I'm working in the sub-256KB range and that's just trivial to send to a datacenter. Might as well have 256 vCPUs doing your compilation for you so you can get a binary blob back in less than half a lifetime. Remember: You can only type so fast, so sending a delta update to the cloud is nothing. Just do everything in the datacentre and be done with it.
So Hestia remote is just a tiny, tiny Amazon instance that's running out there in the big blue ether. Right now it's not there but if I ever wanted to spin up a BIND server, or a Kubernetes orchestrator, or do something equally pointless then there it is. It's a Linux instance that just does whatever I need it to do, and then it goes away. The cloud is great and everything, but if I'm working on my tan then I need it out of the way, kthx.
Hestia local is another animal. That just happens to be any piece of equipment I own that can jack into Hestia and work with, and it's usually the smallest piece of equipment I can find that will get the job done. For my music and video production needs that nearly always means a piece of Apple equipment, such as a MacBook Air. It's a weak machine, but it's a very capable machine. It might take its time on any video I throw at it but it will get the job done eventually. This sums up what I like about Apple hardware - it might not be the fastest, but it's going to work. I love that about Apple, it just works.
It also works just fine with anything Android or Chrome you want to throw at it. Most of those devices are already USB-C capable so they'll beam up to the big screen just fine. This means if you want to take a weak-ass Chromebook to your wordprocessing needs then you absolutely can. You also should. Use the weakest machine you need to actually get your task done, and then don't worry about the cat fuzz in the power supply.
For all my Microsoft and Windows requirements I'm afraid it either has to beam to Hestia via USB-C or I don't care. Windows is a relic for when you want to test hardware, but it requires so much maintenance that I just don't have the time for it anymore. I used to rely on Windows for gaming but I've found it's much better to do this on a Sony PlayStation than to have to download not-broken drivers every time I want to play. Seriously, I don't understand why Windows requires updates every week or so. Oh yeah I can, it's because it's just fundamentally broken. Use something else.
There is one case I would still consider using Windows - that's if I'm raytracing. I used to love raytracing when I was a kid, but you have to wait for the images because they take serious horsepower to generate. In that case I might consider a Windows based machine with an nVidia GPU in it, but it's a tough sell. Raytracing is very compute heavy so often it's just better to leave that to the big iron up there in the cloud. Just throw 256 vCPUs at it occasionally.
And this reminds me of that one time I lost all my meeting notes because Windows decided it needed to reboot in the middle of me using it. Just, no. Seriously? No.