I got my hands on a Lenovo ThinkSmart Hub 500 - you may have seen these in conference rooms, its a small Teams Room or Zoom Room device, based off their Tiny lineup, with a built-in touch display thats about 11" in diagonal.

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkSmart/ThinkSmart_Hub_500/ThinkSmart_Hub_500_Spec.pdf

I left the 128gb nvme in there for now, and threw Debian 12 on it. Touch worked throughout the installation process, all I did was attach a keyboard, power, and network (along with the thumb drive with netinstall), now installed with KDE.

Considering the specs, the only part I’m surprised works well is the touchscreen, its otherwise just a generic lenovo tiny (which I have several of already, 6th-9th gen, as part of my tiny/mini/micro server stack). I could have chosen a different flavor, but I’m a long, long, loooonngggg time Debain user so its my go-to.

In terms of touch, tap, drag, and long press are all working. Video looks good with the UI set at 125% scaling, and to be candid its rather snappy and responsive.

I did this 100% for my own personal entertainment, so now for some thoughts for the community - what would be fun to use it for? A few of my thoughts…

  • I could use it as a HomeAssistant kiosk. Neat, but… overkill compared to the tablets doing the same job.
  • Make it an emulation station, attach my steam controller and maybe my usb adapters for N64/GC/Sega/PS/etc.
  • Use it to test a series of distributions to see how well they handle touch drivers for this silly thing (EndeavorOS is probably going to happen, I may be a long time Debian guy but I should spend more regular time in other things, and not just my arch VMs).
  • I don’t know, gcompris for my kids? They already have it though on an android tablet and an old mac mini (like, 2011ish) hooked up to the TV in the living room.
  • Make it another proxmox endpoint for the cluster, install a DE anyway, and then let it be an always-visible display for grafana?
  • Install OBS, let the hdmi capture have some purpose?

What about you folks, what would you find fun to do with this box?