Embassy Pro presale price is $1499 (limited time, however)
Similarly configured Librem Mini from Purism is $1927.
Are you running EmbassyOS on anything at the moment? Does it deliver on its promises? What distro family is it in? What is it based on? Will it work with Pureboot or does it require Coreboot?
If you don’t mind waiting, it may well be a way of getting a Mini for $400 off.
I’m running EmbassyOS on an RPi4. It does deliver on its promises, IMO, for my purposes. I use it for remote access of my passwords and other secure documents. Unfortunately, NextCloud hasn’t been adapted to the platform at this time. Instead I use File Browser ( https://marketplace.start9.com/filebrowser ) as a somewhat limited substitute. The version of EmbassyOS that I run is built on top of RaspberryPi OS, but the Pro version is built on top of PureOS. Matt Hill of Start9 has a recent podcast discussing, among other things, the Embassy Pro, on the Stephan Livera podcast https://stephanlivera.com/episode/414/
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It looks like Start9 is selling the most recent Librem Mini but with EmbassyOS. I assume they made a deal with Purism? It appears that Start9 is a startup that is targeting the privacy+crypto audience.
One should note that the Librem Mini is simply a rebranded Chinese NUC clone ( https://www.eglobaltech.cn/ViewDetails270.aspx ). This can also be seen since the FCC documents for the Mini have pictures of the internal motherboard that are sourced from eglobal. Heck, even the manual in the FCC page ( https://fccid.io/2AT9R-LMV1-01/Users-Manual/User-Manual-4772946 ) documents the original BIOS of the eglobal device ( American Megatrends ) rather than SeaBIOS+coreboot
Whether it’s Start9 or Purism, the HW is Chinese. To me, it seems like one is paying a high premium for the installation (and some development) of the Free replacement BIOS and firmware.
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Did you purposely forget that for MicrosoftOS is not payed at all there (as usually, for decades, whatever this means to you), in such Linux distribution installed out-of-the-box purchase agreement with customer that finally have opportunity to have such to choose from?
Don’t know much about EmbassyOS - though it sounds interesting, but seems to be a focused on bitcoin stuff.
Just to mention it: there’s another approach to self-hosting that probably will run fine on the Librem Mini:
I guess that must be what they themselves are interested in. Following their links gives this list of services that they say can be self-hosted under EmbassyOS.
I didn’t mention it because the same is true for e-global. Were you not aware of that? You think it’s special, but it’s really not anymore. I would have thought you would be aware that even with the Intel NUC’s, you can buy them barebones (with no OS or even SDD/HDD and install whatever you wish).
The only thing that is arguably “special” is that it comes with a Free BIOS (PureBoot). That’s not typical/normal — which is why I did mention that. Of course that’s an advantage in having a Chinese NUC-knock-off, since actual NUCs have BootGuard which requires an official UEFI/BIOS.
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This particular device (i.e. the device of this topic) also comes with EmbassyOS, which may be of benefit to someone who knows enough to know that he or she should do something about privacy by self-hosting but not enough to know how to do it from scratch.
Mind you, looking through their documentation, I wasn’t completely convinced that they have made it “turnkey” enough.
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