Every linux box (i have 4 on the go at the moment!) have been built from left over parts supplemented by whatever missing bits I could scrounge cheaply online. That's one of the fun parts of those projects getting the best bang for buck with your old components.
Building a Linux box
- Thread starter Ice Tea
- Start date
Installed Ubuntu on a circa 2016/2017 Dell XPS laptop and has given it a fresh new life. I bought it 2nd hand but might try and replace the battery to get it running even better.
Even an old 2nd hand laptop works great, really depends if you have anything spare or what budget you have to use.
Even an old 2nd hand laptop works great, really depends if you have anything spare or what budget you have to use.
Aiming for a modern fully open source Motherboard with coreboot.
I'm dual booting mint again on the red PC in my sig...I'm so utterly sick to death of windows, and it's only going to get worse with the rumored subscription model for win12 - that can get in the sea.
I'm moving properly this time, and I'll just spin up my windows drive for the odd game that I have to, and put it to sleep again after a gaming session.
Mint is soo good at the moment for day to day usage, unless your gaming or have some random app that only works on windows, there's just no need for windows any more, at least, not as a main OS.
I'm moving properly this time, and I'll just spin up my windows drive for the odd game that I have to, and put it to sleep again after a gaming session.
Mint is soo good at the moment for day to day usage, unless your gaming or have some random app that only works on windows, there's just no need for windows any more, at least, not as a main OS.
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My sig PC (7700x, RTX5080) has been running sweetly on Bazzite. Everything's been plug & play which is surprising for an nVidia card. My only complaint is HDR isn't working in Helldivers 2 but I've spent zero time troubleshooting.
I have made the leap too for main PC and Laptop. I have a Windows installation on each (main PC for Battlefield 6, and laptop for BMW software) but neither get used, I'm probably just going to reclaim the disk space.
Windows is dead to me too. Feels good.
I was even runing forza horizon 5 on mint yesterday (via steam) ... it's seriously impressive - I even think the graphics look better, deeper somehow, but i'm getting a bit of occasional judder that i dont get under windows, but to say that's a microsoft game running on linux mint, out of the box, even my xbox pad works on bluetooth properly.
Microsoft can suck deez nutz lol
Agreed lol.
Graphics performance is very decent these days and zero fuss with Steam/Proton. My only wish would be AMD put some effort into bringing the Control Centre tools to Linux, but the Mesa driver is phenomenal at what it does out of the box.
Graphics performance is very decent these days and zero fuss with Steam/Proton. My only wish would be AMD put some effort into bringing the Control Centre tools to Linux, but the Mesa driver is phenomenal at what it does out of the box.
Also if you know where to look you can get pretty decent spec desktop machines for nothing that get chucked out by offices because of simple issues or when they get new ones. Add a decent GPU and you have half decent PC.
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Soldato
- Joined
- 13 Aug 2004
- Posts
- 8,539
- Location
- England
Agreed with the ex-corporate PC's - I'm using a Dell precision T5810 which came with a Xeon and 32GB DDR4 RAM which I bought about 2 years ago for ~£200. I swapped out the CPU for a higher clocking xeon (E5-1650 v4 around £25), installed a 1080ti and put a 250gb samsung EVO drive in using a PCIe slot adapter which cost a couple of quid, so around £350.
For what I use it for it's perfectly capable and will likely be for several more years as my back catalog of games to play is all handled with this set up. I'm just in the process of upgrading to 26.04 and shouldn't have any problems there.
For what I use it for it's perfectly capable and will likely be for several more years as my back catalog of games to play is all handled with this set up. I'm just in the process of upgrading to 26.04 and shouldn't have any problems there.
Considering that you can get a decent i5 office PC for free or dirt cheap I'd be using one of those... some come with 8GB to 16GB RAM which I think its alright for a Linux box, it be the GPU that would be the main cost but even then you can pick up a half decent used GPU for less than 60 pounds... it all depends on what games you want to play otherwise I go for used because you often get quality when buying used.
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Associate
- Joined
- 19 Nov 2021
- Posts
- 1,283
- Location
- Portsmouth
As a home server not doing much apart from dns and a couple of small containers mainly for fiddling, I find my pi5 with nvme base and ssd to be more than sufficient and super economical
Having been through a few different builds recently I'd say I'm reminded that Linux compatibilty can be a 'picky' game. Three different PC's:
It is hardware support like this that can make Linux a pain. Fortunately I've had the time to work through these problems.
Interestinly my two mini PCs; Beelink U59 Pro (recently died - GPU crashes) and Minisforum UM480XT never gave me an issue either running Debian as a server, or Fedora as a desktop.
- My four and half year old AMD AM4 which went from Windows 11 - CachyOS - Bazzite. And other than Bazzite taking a silly about of reboots to install this machine has been faultless with Linux. A joy to use.
- My two week-old AMD AM5 new PC which has been the complete opposite. Built with the intention of using for Linux this PC has been having constant lockups/freezes/crashes and whilst I think I know what's causing it, it has been a slightly painful build. I'm almost tempted to put Windows 11 on it to see if that gives me the same problems. I think I'm waiting for amdgpu fixes which probably won't appear until Kernel 7.2 and at the moment have been playing around with boot parameters to try and stop the crashes.
- My newest PC this weekend - a cheap as chips AMD Ryzen 5 40 ASUS Vivobook Go 15 laptop which shouldn't work with Linux. At least if you believe the masses of forums, reddit post etc. Because it uses the Mediatek MT7902 WiFi card which up until very recently had no Linux support. However Mediatek earlier this year started to develop official drivers and the one for this chip released in the 7.1 kernel. Which of course is very new having only come out on 14th June. My desktop PC has the 7.1.2 kernel from the CachyOS V4 repositories, but the laptop is having to use 7.1.rc7 because the Cachy V3 repositories don't have the 7.1.x kernel yet (or at least didn't yesterday). So in a few months it won't be an issue installing most distros on this laptop, but for me it meant using an old slow wifi N USB card (from my MiSTer) to get CachyOS to download the newest kernel.
It is hardware support like this that can make Linux a pain. Fortunately I've had the time to work through these problems.
Interestinly my two mini PCs; Beelink U59 Pro (recently died - GPU crashes) and Minisforum UM480XT never gave me an issue either running Debian as a server, or Fedora as a desktop.
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Did you try a repaste?
No - I didn't if I'm honest.
This one was an RMA where Beelink sent a new one about 11-months into the warranty as the first one developed a fault (late 2023). As I've recently been auditing all the PCs in the house I connected it to a monitor, installed Debian 13 and could see it fall over every-time with the screen corrupting really badly. I figured that leaned toward memory failure of some kind so is likely beyond repair.
But it would be simple to try repasting I suppose. I kept it as if a reasonable one pops up on sale then I could cobbled one together again. Funily enough the same time this went an 8-year old HP Elitebook X360 (which we got for super cheap years ago) I replaced the battery on it and within a week it starting showing the error code for a faulty motherboard. I did try repasting that and it was beyond saving. So I figured my luck just isn't quite on it at the moment!