The whole concept of the NUC is that it is a very small (constrained) set of hardware that allows for an image to be written targetted for that hardware. Generally for Windows
. (anything that keeps the general windows bloat down makes for a lower required performance envelope and thus better performance out of the small sizes required for a NUC (I know that there are ‘some’ smaller PC’s) The point is it’s fairly easy to target such a platform (a bit like the Raspberry Pi in that it’s a monoculture environment (and why there were a LOT of miss-steps when the Pi4 came out that used a different boot and some different hardware).
It makes some sense why some laptop manufactures adopted the same sorts of harware to fit in a small thermal envelope environment (which is probably why Tom managed with one of his - But I’d say he was damned lucky !
)
The benefits of a laptop are : -
- Built in UPS (but sometimes the battery is so old you’ll only get 2 or 3 minutes from it (I had one like that) )
- You have the hardware lying around, why not re-use it ?
The above is often enough for people to go that route but be prepared for it to fail and that you will HAVE to install Debian (going any other route is asking for trouble as over the last 4 years we have seen hardware/OS restictions for HA getting tighter and tighter (for officially supported systems).
This is mainly (I think anyway) so the Devs can restrict their testing of new releases to a smaller pool of harware/OS’s. Which makes a lot of sense and I can’t argue against it.
kanga_who (referenced above) does excellent guides and keeps them as up to date as possible.
Good Luck