On building a LinuX-box…(for cheap...)

King of Posters
#1

Note: mayhap a duel-boot…
Ok…I searched for were to post this…
But couldn’t find it, if it exists…

Anyways… (as a CompTIA student) I have no idea how to go about this (Windows was easy, but even with a 5,000 TB hard drive - I assume it’s not too hard)

Linux just seems better and my current machine has started running into problems shutting down (a blue screen, not of death, thank god.)

Anywhoo, what I want is a psudo-gaming PC (emulatorial and such) a bit more powerful than my Intel centrino…

HALP!11!!!

#2

As far as I know the only hardware that’s important for Linux as opposed to Windows is stick with an Nvidia GPU.

#3

gaming support has swung pretty significantly back towards windows (10) this year away from linux, a lot of devs weren’t seeing the necessary revenue from steam ports. keep that in mind.

that said, the only important thing to keep in mind is “don’t buy AMD.” Intel pretty runs at parity with Windows along with Nvidia.

#4

yeah, AMD is trash on linux

i had some issues with audio on my motherboard that took some ironing out, but generally support is good these days; google the model numbers to make sure they’re not explicitly incompatible and you’re probably fine

pick a distribution and give it a whirl, many of them allow you to try them out of of the media itself

i run xubuntu personally since i feel the need to run some ubuntu variant for steam dev

#5

i dunno y’all, kubuntu on a kaveri apu seemed to work just fine, mesa’s already got support. slap that on a matx board and you’re good.

#6

there’s “working fine” and there’s “this is not remotely performance or feature-competitive with running the same hardware on Windows.” the linux community is understandably in denial about the latter point sometimes but the takeaway is that with graphics hardware it’s pretty clear cut about which manufacturers it is and isn’t an issue for.

AMD is finally about to be able to declare full opengl 4.5 compatibility with their open-source driver after spending the past year trying to deprecate their old catalyst linux stack (https://mesamatrix.net/) but performance is still pretty terrible if you’re expressly looking to play games.

if we’re talking motherboards I’d always recommend ITX, mATX is cheaper but the form factor is hard to get excited about

#7

Anyhoo… I see a few ways to go, pre-loaded, anyways… on here - https://linuxpreloaded.com/ would anything seem ‘suggested’?

#8

system 76 is anecdotally OK, and the dell XPS 13 is actually a really good notebook even if they didn’t ship linux on it. honestly, though, it’s so hard to get desktop linux “support” from a manufacturer that you’re better off planning to wrangle it yourself unless you wanted a notebook.

#9

Edit: unneeded but, I wrangled myself a Kudu;
7.7 GiB
Intel i7-6700HQ @ 2.6GHz x 8
Mesa Intel HD Graphics 530 (SKL GT2)
2.0 TB

Keep in mind this was 'bout 6-7 months back…

#10

reading over this thread and amused that it’s almost completely different now

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