Subj : Coming back to Linux To : All From : hyjinx Date : Sun Sep 07 2025 09:15 pm Hi All, My work is hectic busy. I never have the 'tinker time' I used to love. I barely have enough time to make my beloved Al's Geek Lab videos on the weekends any more (much sadness). This lack of time was one of the reasons I moved off Linux. I felt that part of the fun of Linux was the tinkering, but it was also a huge time sink. I run a business. When you run a business, every second that you're not working, you're losing money. Literally. If my computer is down, my business is down. So I bought a mac, and I moved on with life. My mac is rock solid, is fast as lightning and is great for editing and rendering video in Davinci Resolve. Last time I tried editing video in Linux it was a hot mess. Kdenlive was yuck as hell, and Davinci Resolve wouldn't accept 'normal' MPEG4 or avi format videos from my camera or vid caps, these were perfectly usable in the modern world, just not on the Linux ver of Davinci. I had to write a script that would then ffmpeg the vid format to one that Davinci would be OK with. It is that sort of timewasting that ruined my day. Yet, part of me still pines for Linux. Using a sweet machine with some decent CPU and graphics card that could play steamdeck games once in a blue moon, as well as run some workloads like my dev stuff in i3 or a similar light wm. Apple Silicon is all very nice, but until x64 is completely dead and everyone moves to ARM, there are just some other things that don't work on ARM. Less and less these days, but I do a lot of retro stuff, and occasionally I want to spin up a Windows95 VM, or a Windows 11 box in proxmox or similar. So... if I was to do such a thing, can you recommend how I would go about it? What hardware would you recommend? I am so out of date with modern hardware, all the Ryzen's and i9's and so forth really mean very little to me. I would have no idea where to start to buy a motherboard, CPU and gfx card that worked well with Linux. It would obviously need to have sound, USB C, WiFi 6, NVMe storage capability and a graphics card that had enough heft to render graphics reasonably quickly. The NVIDIA appeal naturally is CUDA, being able to play with graphics models sounds cool, but as long as I can do similar stuff with AMD/ATI, I'm not fussed. If you've got recommendations, I'd love to hear them. Naturally, if you are indicating costs, that too is helpful, because I will have a budget (given that I will still have to use my mac as a daily driver). Unfortunately I'm in New Zealand, so everything is like 15-20% more expensive down here, and I can't really buy it online from places in the USA, because by the time DJT puts on his tarrifs, or when it sits in our customs warehouse and gets even more import taxes slapped on it, costs can be up to 30-50% more than ticket price, depending upon whether Customs pick up on it or not. For me, we usually buy at places like https://pbtech.co.nz for imported goods. Much of it comes from China or other Asian countries. I try to steer clear of labels because I don't know what's in the machines (e.g. Lenovo are well known not to be trusted in NZ), as well as the quality of their cases or integrated hardware can be poor. Best to know what is going in the tin by making it myself, I'll pay a little more for that privilege but hey. I do like these fairly slimline boxes too. I have 3 NUC boxes in the house and they are great for low power compute tasks, even the i5 one I have is pretty reasonable actually, but it won't be sufficient for what I'm going to be using this one for. Looking forward to your thoughts! TIA, Al hyjinx // Alistair Ross Author of 'Back to the BBS' Documentary: https://bit.ly/3tRINeL (YouTube) alsgeeklab.com --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64) * Origin: bbs.alsgeeklab.com:2323 (21:1/126) .