PC Linux build?

[iMigraine]

Hey, thinking of building my first linux only PC. Have built many Windows PCs but wanting to learn/play with either Ubuntu or Mint.

Main goal is to do basic tasks, play videos, edit audio, open office, photo editing, browsing internet and be able to VPN educational torrents. No gaming since my Windows PC can do that stuff fine and I haven't had much time to play anything.

Wondering if 8 or 16GB of Ram is preferred? Looking for stability, unlike Windows. Thanks

[arrix]

Coming from Windows, go with Mint with Cinnamon for your desktop. Mint is based on Ubuntu but more stable since the Mint team has a slower release cycle. I would either make a bootable USB image and just play with the live cd sandbox before you do the actual install or you could spin up some VirtualBox VMs to install the various Linux distros over your Windows environment.

EDIT: I'd go with 16 gb but 8 should be perfectly fine too.

[incredablehefey]

For the most part Linux can run on a potato. As mentioned in the post above mine the easiest way to try Linux is is to just use a live portable drive or an external hard drive. The faster the better.

[Helpful_Cub]

You'll be shocked at how efficient Linux is with its resource use. Windows is such a hog I think we all just got use to it over the years. Drives use to be my challenge, hopefully you don't have some new bleeding edge hardware which may need to wait for someone to write the drivers for Linux.

[arrix]

You'll be shocked at how efficient Linux is with its resource use. Windows is such a hog I think we all just got use to it over the years. Drives use to be my challenge, hopefully you don't have some new bleeding edge hardware which may need to wait for someone to write the drivers for Linux.

Aside from the footprint, there's so much spyware/keylogging built into Windows now, it's literally unsafe to use.

[cz74]

5 years ago I got from eBay auction $100 Refurbished Dell PowerEdge T20 server with 8GB of RAM, Intel Xeon 4-core processor, hard drives are cheap now with TB of storage. It runs nicely Ubuntu. If you do gaming then 16GB RAM at least. I play with Docker/Kubernetes/Minikube containers and coding in my spare time, 8GB of RAM is pushing it to limits right now.

[Dragunov]

Hey, thinking of building my first linux only PC. Have built many Windows PCs but wanting to learn/play with either Ubuntu or Mint.

Main goal is to do basic tasks, play videos, edit audio, open office, photo editing, browsing internet and be able to VPN educational torrents. No gaming since my Windows PC can do that stuff fine and I haven't had much time to play anything.

Wondering if 8 or 16GB of Ram is preferred? Looking for stability, unlike Windows. Thanks

For Linux Mint, 8 is fine, 16 is better.

[musick]

For Linux Mint, 8 is fine, 16 is better.

Agreed. You can create a bootable key here:

https://www.linuxliveusb.com/

If you decide to install you can do so from the key.

[Robotron2k84]

[spitter3]

Screw the old hardware ideal, just virtual box a few distros on your current pc and learn away.

[Robotron2k84]

I need the VMs to be running 24x7, so a small PC > laptop / full PC.

VBX is a pain to deal with, and its ProxyIO model has real performance problems. KVM all the way.

[iMigraine]

Screw the old hardware ideal, just virtual box a few distros on your current pc and learn away.

I'll start playing with USB Bootable Linux disrtos. But, I like the idea of a dedicated Linux box and my Windows PC next to it so I can look up stuff while figuring out stuff. Might try to play with a virtual box but I'm thinking of setting up a dedicated NAS/streaming box on my local network.

Love all the ideas guys. Not looking to spend much for basic tasks.

[Robotron2k84]

VirtualBox will never give you the experience of getting a real PC to work with Linux and configuring real hardware. VBX is optimized to be the blandest hardware in the universe. Good for homogeneity for large compute farms, but suboptimal for learning configuring real iron.

[Cowboy T]

I'll start playing with USB Bootable Linux disrtos. But, I like the idea of a dedicated Linux box and my Windows PC next to it so I can look up stuff while figuring out stuff. Might try to play with a virtual box but I'm thinking of setting up a dedicated NAS/streaming box on my local network.

Love all the ideas guys. Not looking to spend much for basic tasks.

Actually, a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB DRAM and an external USB 3 SSD would be good for getting your feet wet with Linux. It's very compact and doesn't use much power. Raspbian (now named Raspberry Pi OS) is Debian for the Pi. Remember that Ubuntu comes from Debian, and the Pi version of Debian is actually a pretty nice, functional desktop. I did a review of the Pi 4 as such on a thread here about a year ago. For basic, everyday computing, it's surprisingly good.

Now, if you want something with more oomph, like an AMD or Intel box, then I'd suggest 16GB. I recently built two Debian boxes and one Slackware box, and each has 64GB, but I'm very much a power user. Those boxes are for some DRAM-heavy tasks involving lots of QEMU-KVM virtual machine work. The box I use as my daily workstation, the one I'm typing this post on, is a Kubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" box. Until very recently, it had 16GB DRAM, but since I'm doing VM's now, I bumped it up to 32GB, but the VM's are the only reason I did that. But for that, 16GB is plenty sufficient on an Intel/AMD box.

[the86d]

I'd go with a QUAD-CORE, 16GB RAM, 256GB MINIMUM SSD/M.2, and a openGL video card, but since you aren't playing high-end games, any mid-grade no-fan GPU should suffice, if it has some RAM on it...

The newish *buntu's, and derivatives OOTB are kind of RAM/CPU hogs, as is KDE these days...

I'd say Slackware, and work up, after some skills are achieved, and Ubuntu is an African word, meaning Slackware is too hard for me... ... ...