Well, I have this hand off laptop (not for long) for a long time now and have been hosting the ariamath.xyz server ever since I remember getting the domain and back then I was not thinking of doing a pubnix that much. but then as I went on and found out what you really want out of a pubnix, or a server, I was like pubnix servers or servers in general being low powered than your client machine is kinda bad cuz you might have a old low end laptop that you use and you want a server that can handle your heavier task you don't want done on your client, or you use a thin client to directly interface some supercomputer in the company, instead of having multiple computers at each desk. Most people do not like (like me) source based distros for one reason that is the fact that you need to compile stuff on the client. The answer really isn't this and honestly its rather better to just used binary distros anyways, but if you do not trust binary distros, you can consider to use a source based distro, but do your compilation (generating objects) on the server, and then the linking part on your client so that it links to the local libc. And that you can leave something to compile on the server on the go without having to care about running out of power on the client.

Basically, I mean that you are not gonna carry around a supercomputer or a powerful computer with you are you? right? rather just keep a powerful tech at home, and then access it from your client machine anywhere in the world, that depends if you have the power to keep your server on for 24/7 or maybe for when you are awake (for personal use), maybe you like have a UPS good enough to give backup power to your server for atleast an hour. Modern machines are efficient in using electricity anyways and ultimately a powerful server would not really take that much of a hit on your current bill, maybe around $20/mo depending on the power clamping and all that, and also performance enhancements, (and if there is a GPU or not). If there is a GPU, its fine you can basically just clamp the power draw from it through software so that it doesn't even use much power to keep running on idle. Also having a good GPU on the server can help with also your audio and video decoding/encoding capabilities, and also help you maybe even do some video editing with ffmpeg.

Honestly, there is something called X forwarding through SSH, so you can have your pubnix users use that to maybe use application on the server to do some heavy stuff, even stuff like firefox (which kinda do work). I have personally not tried using Kdenlive or anything like that so I cannot really give a good review on X forwarding that much, and well if you don't have a decently recent machine, you probably cannot game through X forwarding at all because it'd basically be unbearable to play over X forwarding, but it can work, you can do it, but its not playable on low end machines. Some static-ly GUI stuff would work quite nicely, maybe.

I came to this kinda conclusion when I started SSH'ing into my PC, and using the NVENC capabilities of my GPU, and also the more powerful CPU that my PC has (compared to my x201) that I could perhaps as I have stated use it to compile applications for my client, but the main problem is that I'm on OpenBSD and that depends on bsd-libc, and I mainly have to compile objects and then link them locally, compiling a project is 80/20 object/linking operation meaning that the linking part is basically negligble compared. Ultimately, haven't done that because I don't think this is productive and rather just use unix-like projects instead that does the work with less computer resources and much easier to compile as well and also with the philosophy of "Less is more" and that simple and lower level programs are much faster and easier to use as a unix pilled user. I just love Unix-like and Unix pilled projects, because they are often crazy easy to get hacking into, possibility is endless on Unix-likes.

Well, that's about the reasoning to like use my PC as a server because ultimately being able to abuse my PC outside is a big plus for me, and that advantage could also be helpful to you all as well :P (maybe). But before I could get over the pubnix atleast on the PC, I need a UPS on that thing and I also need to organise my files on the machine so that it doesn't have anything private... well I already kinda am done with that and all that I really have on the PC is just my games that I play occassionally :P cuz I gotta game! I will announce when the pubnix is available and until then the pubnix is closed. I hope I can get the pubnix up and running real quick. Ba-bye!