Silently retreats to bushes with his Ryzen 5 3600/RX 6600 “gaming” PC. It’s got a purty case and a buttload of RAM though!
I have been pretty happy with Tuxedo OS as my main OS (Win11 hangs around for CAD), acting like a sort of de-Snapped Kubuntu. I was running KDE Bazzite for a little while, and it ran like butter (adjust your expectations for the aforementioned specs), but I fell into a tiny demographic doughnut hole. I do just enough development stuff (mostly for keyboards, LOL) that I needed to install dev tools, but I’m not a trained coder or sysadmin, and I’m not sophisticated enough with Linux to understand how to adapt instructions for the various containers and sandboxes and workarounds that an immutable distro wants before it lets you tinker.
Now I’m using a FormD 1st gen and it’s all air cooled and stock. Gotta find some time to rebuild that Ghost and figure out a better external rad solution.
This thread definitely makes me want to build a workstation again, as I currently lack one. Been using a Framework laptop as a daily driver for awhile and quite happy with them (and their Linux support).
I did build a server a bit ago that might qualify tho, as I kinda went nuts with it.
Primary array: 2x 5-bay hot swap racks (uses 3 bays each, drives are on their sides)
Spares/backups: 3-bay hot swap rack (uses 2 bays)
2x Intel Optane (RIP) 58GB SSDs (for zfs WAL)
And still another 8x PCIe lane should I want more drives
Corsair AX1200i modular PSU (with dongle to read stats from it)
Custom front panel because nothing matched and it’s just a bunch of LEDs and buttons anyway
Custom power cables using silicone wire for everything (got a bunch of Molex connectors and pins)
No fancy water-cooling, just a bunch of Noctua fans. I went with a server-class motherboard as the goal was a giant pile of disk space under zfs, which really wants ECC RAM (if you like your data integrity, anyway). Currently using raidz3, so I can lose up to 2 disks before I lose data, across 10 disks, with a hot and cold spare. The cold spare is sitting in the bay but not powered up – just have to hit one button to add it. Figuring out the total space is a bit tricky with zfs, but I think it was around 55-60TB before I started putting stuff on there.
The Optane stuff is cool but sadly never caught on. It sorta fell between DRAM and NAND flash storage. In this case, it’s being used as a NVMe block storage device. It’s basically perfect for the WAL in zfs – fastest writes of any solid state storage (so better than flash), and keeps it on power loss (better than DRAM). And you don’t really need much space for zfs WAL: I’m only using 4GB of the 58GB on each stick of it.
Need to take newer pictures since I can’t seem to find any pictures of the cabling work, but here’s an older pic when I was setting things up and had another 5x bay in there (now swapped for a 3-drives-in-2-bays to free up one 5.25” bay).
I just started using the Cosmic DE Beta with the new pop!_os beta. So far I highly recommend it. I will probably stop bothering with tiling window managers in the future because the tiling window manager built into this is so solid + you get a whole fully functional DE with it.
going to keep putting it through its paces, but it’s really nice, especially for a beta.
edit: Some gremlins showing themselves with system freezes for me. Forgot how much I don’t like tracking down issues in a DE like I used to do in Gnome. Going back to Sway and Debian because they’ve been rock solid for basically ever for me.
Since I repurposed my former media room gaming PC, it’s now a gaming PC in a business suit lol. It’s got a custom 3D printed shroud for the 9070 XT and 3x Noctua NF-A9s.
