This seems to be a duplicate of an older post:
atom is too underpowered, the low power intel chips are great.
You still have to pay to be connected to the net, and that’s where the trouble begins.
Yeah, I’ve got one of those, it’s called a PC.
I do all this with my $35 Raspberry pi…
Hi HubrisSonic, Johannes here (the guy who listed Indie Box One on IndieGoGo).
Obviously you are right that there are plenty of processors that are faster than Atom, and that’s what you might want for certain applications. On the other hand, a lot of people are concerned about electrical power consumption, and in my experience, there’s a big difference in power consumption between this Atom configuration and something faster. (I run both at home.) So we picked one particular configuration for this campaign – if you don’t like it (and you apparently are a geek, otherwise you’d hardly have an opinion on relative performance) – you can pick the “bring your own hardware option” and turn a badass server of your choice into your Indie Box. This project is not very much about the hardware, but making it possible to run apps at home, which is mostly a systems administration time/skill set problem.
@tengobotas: congratulations if you can do that with your RPi. Most people can’t, which is why we offer a ready-to-use SDCard for the RPi, and of course a fully-configured dual-disk system, so you won’t lose your valuable data because your SDCard dies or your USB cable comes lose.
@newliminted: we’ve been asked about mesh networking support several times. Would you agree that it would be easier to do that if we all ran “real” Linux boxes (like Indie Box One) at home, instead of some sealed home router? That’s one of the avenues that Indie Box opens.
@Thecorrectline Hi there, me=random guy from IndieGoGo here 
Unlike your typical home router firewall, it’s a standard Linux distro on Indie Box One, and you have root. We welcome you to check on us, as I point out in the listing. Some of your other questions also seem to be answered in the listing on IndieGoGo.
You still need to back your stuff up offsite, and then you’re back to square one.
Sure, but what I was indicating is that for about the same money you can get a 20W multi-core intel xeon chip. Yes, its more than the 3w or whatever for Atom but I personally have found that chip to be sluggish. The xeon will run at around 10w-15w normally end get a couple of factors of better performance. That being said, of course, it is a very good initiative you have started. I strongly recommend it. I just also recommend using a L class xeon chip you will get better a user experience.
you can use this project to backup your server to a cluster of all those old usb sticks you have laying around the house! https://github.com/lyda/media-backups
@HubrisSonic This is really cute. May actually solve a real problem. Thanks for pointing it out. Would you like to package it up as an app for Indie Box? 
We’d love to see apps like that!
$500 for a simple home server seems really steep. I’ve been hosting my email and websites for years using a used datacentre-grade server and firewall, which I purchased for far less than $500.
Now, the equipment I am using isn’t user-friendly (user-hostile seems like a more appropriate description), but for $500 I’d expect this to have an amazing UI.
@understep if you are concerned about the cost of the hardware, I suggest you “bring your own” and support us by buying one of the USB stick options. Here in Silicon Valley, for example, Fry’s sometimes sells motherboards for $0.01 (!) and you could definitely put together hardware at a lower cost, even with two notebook drives and two ethernet ports as Indie Box One. The trouble is that we can’t sell that kind of one-off thing as a product … but we were thinking of people like you when we decided to add bring-your-own hardware options.
I have always felt like peer mesh internet is a dream. Perhaps it is a dream today, but will become real in the future. It wants to be real and it needs to be real. I just don’t know if I am smart enough or rich enough to help.
I was really interested in the similar Mi World Portable Computing System which just reached its funding goal on Indiegogo, but the Indie Box looks like it might meet my needs even better.
Uh, are we gonna talk about how this is like a blatant ripoff of arkOS ? Not to mention waaay more expensive and with less features ? @Johannes_Ernst ?
@reckoner2112 – hmm. Permit me to rephrase your question as “How does Indie Box relate to arkOS, and did it inspire you to start this project?” If that’s your question, I’d be happy to answer: Indie Box, arkOS and freedombox have all very similar goals, but with substantial differences in focus. I would put it as follows: Freedombox has a focus on communications security and secrecy, with little emphasis on apps. arkOS is built around making web system administration easier driven by a forked/expanded version of the ajenti web server admin panel called genesis, while Indie Box is targeted towards people who don’t want to deal with any system administration at all but are comfortable with an app store front end. To me, the projects are all complementary. (All of them are free/libre anyway, and their code can be downloaded for free; none of them costs any money.). And no about the inspiration, while the Indie Box name goes back only about a year and the code got re-written several times, the roots of this project got back some years, before there was an arkOS (to the best of my knowledge).
Can I suggest that we all, in the free/open-source community, instead of throwing stuff at each other, acknowledge what everybody has been creating, respect it, build on each other as appropriate, and work together so we all have a chance to actually make a difference against the big internet overlords? More ideas is more better in my book …
Interesting, as the GH code was only committed well after ArkOS started… hmm…
At any rate, I still don’t see how they are really different. ArkOS is doing app-store stuff too, and is much more than just the web front-end. Not to mention less expensive and with more features as I stated above. Maybe you could try to make these things clearer in your IndieGogo page. If the differences are really as “substantial” as you say…
Yes “working together” is important, instead of everyone creating their own platform… taht’s what got us into this mess with Apple/Google/Facebook/etcetc in the first place…
