What would be your perfect Linux workstation?

Cromulent

Cromulent

Cromulent

Soldato
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England
I'm interested in hearing about both hardware and software. So what would be your perfect Linux workstation?

I'm pretty happy with my current set up but with space being limited I can't fit in multiple monitors which really hampers my productivity. I'd probably get an AMD GPU since the open-source drivers are so much better than the open-source Nvidia drivers. In fact, I had to install the official drivers from Nvidia in order to get things working in the way that I wanted.

Software-wise my most used program for work is Visual Studio Code and I'm learning QEMU / KVM so I can try and ditch VMWare Workstation Pro which costs an arm and a leg. I'm also learning Docker and other related things. I think I probably went overkill on the hardware front when I bought this PC but I upgrade so rarely if it lasts 5 - 7 years I reckon it'll be a good investment seeing as I use it for about 12 hours every day.

OpenSUSE LEAP 15.2 is my distribution of choice at the moment but I want to switch from KDE to i3 at some point. I'm just waiting to buy a printer so I can print out the keyboard shortcut list so I can learn how to use it :).
 
whitecrook said:
laptop or desktop ? The lenovo P series laptop/poratable workstations would be high on my list of considered systems for linux based install should i ever move a way from mac os
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I was thinking more along the lines of a desktop but I'll look into those laptops. I'm more of a desktop person though as I rarely go out and am technically self-employed so I just stay at home all day. My current computer is pretty good but I do like fantasising about better ones which is why I started this thread :D.
 
SKILL said:
I'm kinda looking at getting both a new laptop and workstation over the coming months, I left my job back in September and started a limited company to be self-employed, it's gone well but I'm still using my personal hardware which is mediocre at best...

I've got a laptop, a small/old Dell with a dual-core intel chip that I bought refurbished for £150 back in 2019, and my 'server' which is a Ryzen 5 3600. I've got the latter setup with unraid, and using a Linux VM for the work side but also a Windows VM for personal/gaming usage, so I've assigned a paltry 3-cores (+SMT) per VM, 32Gb for windows and 16Gb for Linux which is enough for my usage.

I run Linux Mint on the laptop as I like the interface and it 'just works', then Gentoo on the VM/Server. 99% of my work is Yocto based and I've got Docker containers for building that so it doesn't matter really what the host OS is.

With the laptop I've really struggled to decide, I was looking at buying one this month before the end of the tax year (moved the company one to the end of March), but with the super-deduction stuff I'll be leaving it for now. My big issue here is for work stuff I want that Ryzen goodness but as it's largely used at home on a dock with multiple monitors (1x 2560x1440, 1x 1920x1200), and having had really bad experiences with USB-C docks I'd really like Thunderbolt... I'd kinda settled on the LG Gram 17 2021, not exactly workstation spec but 'ok'...

One of the main issues I have finding laptops is I have zero need for a GPU, yet a lot of the 'workstation' ones come with some expensive Quadro and no need to drop it even though you can configure everything else.

Proper workstation wise I'm eyeing up a Threadripper system, maybe even Threadripper Pro (for the extra mem bandwidth, not sure it's necessary though), 'enough' cores, some M2 SSD's in RAID0 for a fast store (and obviously a more reliable storage system for non-build important stuff), decent chunk of mem/bandwidth, good times :D

I'll probably go Linux Mint again on whatever laptop, not sure on the workstation, maybe go for a hypervisor/vm setup, who knows...
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Have a look at Lenovo Thinkpads for laptops. Wait until they release Ryzen 5000 models though. You don't even need to pay for a Windows license as you can get it with Linux pre-installed.
 
SKILL said:
I did look at Lenovo laptops, outside the (seemingly very limited) defined spec laptops the lead times are silly, like 10+ weeks... And as mentioned, although I'd love Ryzen (4 or 5000), without Thunderbolt for a proper dock solution I'm not sure it's viable...
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Hmm, I thought the new models came with USB4 support which is the successor to Thunderbolt?
 
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