Except for LLM inference speed, macs suck as a server and are pretty expensive, why wouldn't you get a Linux box?

Buying a Mac specifically for serving is misguided in nearly all use cases, but as an all-in-one solution they make sense. Personally I feel like the number of boxes I need to manage has an inverse correlation to my happiness.

Macs are totally “fine” for light server duty… as is just about any computer of the last decade+. The CPUs are beasts, the disks are screaming fast.

The operating system itself may not be ideal at serving but you can just run Docker/Orbstack if you need to do something especially Linux-y.

I’d put the question back on you — what are scenarios where an Apple Silicon Mac wouldn’t cut it as a light server for one person or a handful of people? About the only scenario that comes to mind is scenarios where you expect to utilize it so heavily that the fans are running for many hours a day. At some point those are either gonna wear out or just ingest so much dust that the machine runs hotter and needs a deep clean. But even that is largely mitigated by just pointing an external fan at it.

Because it's not exactly a server, more like a home PC / dev machine that I also remote into. Usually SSHing but sometimes VNC which is annoying in Linux. And the Mac mini is pretty fast. Yes a Linux box would win in terms of multicore CPU(?) or GPU if you need to run big batch processes, or a high-uptime service. My work is running those on cloud, not in my house.