Ground up Linux PC build

[DiTBho]

(wait 2 years and you'll find it with Haiku support (beta4?) and for a quarter of the current price)

[John B]

Speaking of the ARMs, one possibility I forgot to consider was re purposing a hackintosh I built into the linux build and purchasing an Apple studio box.

At the moment I really need MacOS and thunderbolt for audio work, but even spec'ing out a base CPU model with 64GB of ram and a 4TB SSD (to match the hackintosh) comes out to $5.5K.

It's a lot of extra upfront cost that comes with the risk of vendor lock in repairs and forced obsolescence with parts being unavailable down the line. Plus you know, Apple.

One thing I will work on is the audio production situation in Linux, but that will almost certainly be a multi-year project getting it to a stage where I can run hardware and software reliably.

I might need to try audio production on Windows again in future, purpose built and completely stripped and debloated. Probably in a mini ITX or micro ATX form factor.

[DiTBho]

Two days ago, friend of mine found a ThinkPad X13s (ARM) for 1200 Euro.
Second hand, from a show-room.

This is the ideal right price 

[John B]

Hello World*

*now from Fedora

Build consists of:

Ryzen 5950X
64GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200MHz RAM
ASUS Radeon RX6600XT
ASUS Creator Proart B550 motherboard
Samsung 970 EVO  2TB + Samsung 870 4TB SSD

It will certainly be plenty of performance for me. Although AM5 was very tempting, I think it would have been throwing money away for no good reason - I'm already in that ballpark  . AM4, DDR4 etc is now the last gen stuff, so the prices are going to approach the minimum of what they will be. Even if I had bought the 7950X, AMD is already talking about releasing the 7950X3D version, and so the merry go round continues.

Fedora is quite easy to set up. All the hardware was compatible out of the box. Just needed to add the extra repos and media codecs to get websites like Odysee working.

I might even stick with GNOME for a while, to see if I can get used to it or like it.

[Ed.Kloonk]

[Karel]

Impressive!

[JohanH]

Hello World*

*now from Fedora

Build consists of:

Ryzen 5950X
64GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200MHz RAM
ASUS Radeon RX6600XT
ASUS Creator Proart B550 motherboard
Samsung 970 EVO  2TB + Samsung 870 4TB SSD

Very nice! 64GB memory, that's something. I'm still only on 16GB.

This is my desktop that's been running for a year:

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
16 GB memory
Nvidia Geforce 1070 (from previous build)
MSI MAG B550M Bazooka motherboard
Crucial P5 NVMe 500 GB PCIe M.2 + Crucial MX500 2TB 2.5" SATA
NZXT Kraken X62 water cooler (from previous build)
Fractal Design Define 7 Compact chassis

The motherboard was a last minute budget decision, I found out too late that it lacked optical sound out (toslink). I added an internal USB hub and a small USB-toslink soundcard. It has worked fine. I've been using Fedora on my desktop for more than 10 years now (and on server consoles before that) and I always see forward to a new release.

[Doctorandus_P]

First, congratulations with you new pc. Wish you many happy years with it.

Although AM5 was very tempting, I think it would have been throwing money away for no good reason - I'm already in that ballpark 

As far as I know it's usually not a good idea to buy the latest and greates hardware for Linux. Every new platform exposes new bugs and it can take a while for those bugs to be fixed and the platform to stabilize.

I bought an AMD E350 Zacate long time ago, and it took years for linux drivers to be fixed, and by that time the platfrom was obsolete. A friend of mine bought an 2400G when it was quite new and had "random" crashes occasionally but those also went away after a few kernel updates.

I bought an AMD 5600G myself in December 2022 and that has been purring happily from the start. I've also got a 107cm 4K monitor and the internal graphics of the 5600G handles it with ease. As long as you're not a gamer or have other extreme graphics needs, there is no need whatsoever to buy a separate graphics card. I bought an Asrock Mobo with it (They used to be rock bottom low quality stuff 30 years ago, but now make lots of industrial quality stuff).  I rarely have more then 4GB of RAM in use, and 8GB would have been enough, but I bought 16GB to be "future proof".  I know that some people need much more RAM, but it completely depends on the software you want to run. Buying less than 16GB would be silly because of of it's low cost compared to the rest of a PC. It would be the wrong place to shave of EUR30.

I am not an AMD fanboy, but I despise Intel because of their anti competitive behavior. I still remember that they wrote a compiler that slogged down intentionally if it did not find the string "genuie intel" in the processor identification. They've also been blackmailing computer manufacturers with threatening with higher prices if those manufacturers also sold AMD PC's.

[Doctorandus_P]

Ryzen 5950X
64GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200MHz RAM
ASUS Radeon RX6600XT
ASUS Creator Proart B550 motherboard
Samsung 970 EVO  2TB + Samsung 870 4TB SSD

 throwing money away for no good reason - I'm already in that ballpark  .

Indeed. If you're not an active gamer or have other extreme needs that configuration is a complete waste of money.
I would not even want to exchange the PC I bought a year ago (5600G 16GB Ram 500Gb SSD with 2Gb/s or so transfer rate) with yours for free. I assume it will suck an extra few hundred euros of energy out of the wall socket over its lifetime compared with my configuration.
The processor I bought has now halved in price. It sells now for EUR130, while I paid EUR240 for it. In the middle of  coronageddon it peaked at EUR300 and video cards were simply unobtainable. I paid around EUR650 for all the hardware in my PC, and I put it in an old windoze XP box (still has the stickers on it). The money I saved on the PC, I added to the monitor budget and I invested EUR1000 in an Aorus 43 something someting monitor. (I forgot the brand but it sais "AORUS" on the front and it's big an high quality with very crisp and beautiful colors. Only weird thing is I have to turn the brightness down to 6% to avoid needing sunglasses or getting blinded by the thing).

[John B]

Discrete graphics cards are required with the 5950X, which is fine because that is probably the one thing that will get upgraded in the system over time. I wanted to keep gaming potential in there, plus the RAM will be used for video editing, virtual machines and RAM drives. I'm now working on Kdenlive and Blender, formerly just using an ancient version of Sony Vegas but with difficulty due to the lack of system performance. New hardware has opened some new avenues for me.

[SiliconWizard]

So is a NVidia card *that* bad these days on Linux, or is it a viable option?
I have a workstation that I'm planning on switching to Linux and it has a NVidia graphics card. The card itself works plenty fine for this use so I would like to avoid having to replace it.

[JohanH]

So is a NVidia card *that* bad these days on Linux, or is it a viable option?

There is not much trouble with a discrete Nvidia GPU (don't mention laptops...). It has gotten better through the years. I've been using Nvidia cards as long as I can remember (and I've been using Linux on the desktop for soon 15 years). It mostly depends on how good distributions/driver packages are handling the installation and compilation of the Nvidia kernel module. Whenever you upgrade the kernel and/or the Nvidia driver, you have to make sure that the kernel module is recompiled. This is handled by the driver scripts mostly, but sometimes the compilation fails and you are greeted with a black window. It hasn't happened to me for a couple of years, though.

For newer Nvidia graphics cards, there is a new open source kernel driver coming (presented by Nvidia themselves), which means that the driver has the potential to become as user friendly as AMD. But there is some time before this becomes reality.

One downside is that the Nvidia driver still works most reliably with Xorg (X11). It has issues with Wayland (although it's being worked on). This means for example in Fedora, I have to select an Xorg session when logging in for everything to work.

[SiliconWizard]

I'll be using Arch, and they have an official nvidia package so there should never be issues with the kernel, updates are pretty clean for the most part.
I'd like to use Wayland though.

[JohanH]

I'll be using Arch, and they have an official nvidia package so there should never be issues with the kernel, updates are pretty clean for the most part.
I'd like to use Wayland though.

You can try out Wayland, it depends on the software that you use. I like to enable Gnome Nightlight and it doesn't work in Wayland, although Nvidia has an internal bug open and promised to work on it. There are also sometimes issues with some applications, e.g. flatpaks. But you will notice it when the application window is blank.

Edit. Just to emphasize (for avoiding misunderstanding), it's the Nvidia driver that is the issue. It's just a matter of priorities. If Nvidia want to fix it, they will. And I'm sure they will, eventually. Wayland is fine, I had a phone already in 2014 that used Wayland (Jolla with Sailfish OS).

[RoGeorge]

If this is the first Linux desktop, maybe start with Ubuntu instead of Arch.  Arch is OK, just that I wouldn't recommend as a distro to switch to when leaving Windows.  Arch might require at least average Linux admin skills, and might brake at some updates.  Ubuntu requires zero skills and never brakes.  At first you'll probably jump through a few distros anyways, unless you look for set and forget (that will be Ubuntu).

nVidia works in Linux, just that here and there nVidia drivers might make problems.

You can try Wayland together with any other desktop (in Linux you can install all of them and pick which one do you want to use today, just like the Internet Explorer "Where do you want to go today" ), but I think Wayland is too young.  Only comes with incompatibilities and no real advantage.  Maybe in 5-10 years from now it will worth switching to Wayland.  'Till then, Gnome for big buttons, tablet style and almost no settings, Plasma for desktop style and a gazillion of settings.

When switching from Windows to Linux, the distro, the file system and the desktop environments are not that important and can be changed later.

The most important thing when migrating is the mindset:
Do not try to make Linux look and behave like Windows.

Take Linux as it is, make new usage habits and use new tools appropriate for the new OS.  If you want it to be like Windows, then use Windows.  Got this advice from somebody here, on EEVblog, while I was keep installing and agonizing between Linux flavors and desktop environments.  Once I've let it go, Linux become a joy to use.  You'll see, it will be slightly different, and better.

Except if you are a hardcore gamer.  If so, then Linux is not a good choice, stay windows Windows.  Some games might work with Linux, but Windows is way ahead at gaming.

[themadhippy]

  Ubuntu requires zero skills and never brakes.

your obviously a ubuntu newbie,although the amount of failures has been extremely low,and its certainly improved a lot  there has still been a few times were its done a mighty fine impression of being very broken.

[Zucca]

*now from Fedora

I just installed Ubuntu for my bench PC. Just beacuse I have the Picoscope SW running out of the box.

Fedora looks nice as workstation horse

drooling about arch... yes I want problems because solving problems is the best way to learn for me.
Once I made my bones in arch, I will punish myself trying Gentoo....

[SiliconWizard]

Once I made my bones in arch, I will punish myself trying Gentoo....

I tested Gentoo a long time ago. The idea was interesting but it was much too time consuming for installations and updates, since it compiles everything. Sure with more recent hardware, that's probably not as much of a problem, but still. Just compiling a modern web browser will take a good hour with recent hardware, unless you can afford the top of the range CPUs (I think Firefox takes about 9 min to build with an AMD EPYC CPU!)

Note that you can have the benefits of the Gentoo approach on Arch if you invest the time, and only on the packages you want that. Thanks to the AUR on Arch, you can make your own source-based packages (if they don't already exist.) They perfectly co-exist with the official binary packages.

With Gentoo, your computer will spend half of its run time on compiling stuff.

[John B]

So far I can definitely recommend Fedora even for a newbie. There's only a few things which aren't "out of the box" ready, ie non-free and proprietary software,repositories,media codecs and drivers. Once the RPM fusion and flathub repositories are installed just about everything is taken care of.

When embarking on a project I try to keep in mind what the goal of the project is. The idea was to be able to perform all my daily tasks independently of the microsoft ecosystem. So the OS should be stable, simple and well maintained. Only a couple of programs haven't worked for me (the RPM version didn't, but flathub versions did).

If you want a tool to perform a task, making the tool shouldn't supercede the task. I'll no doubt try out an Arch build at some point in a VM, but I don't want it to become a toy OS where trying to keep it running becomes the goal.

Web browsing, Libreoffice, Kicad, Freecad, video editing all seem to work perfectly fine. The only crashes I've had seem to be associated with VLC, but it's needed because it has the necessary codecs for most formats you'll come across.

The only thing which I haven't found is a good circuit simulator for Linux. I did get LTspice working through wine, but it uses a single CPU core only. I haven't used Kicad's simulator yet.

Also I may or may not be in the process of trying to get Skyrim to work.

[SiliconWizard]

The only thing which I haven't found is a good circuit simulator for Linux. I did get LTspice working through wine, but it uses a single CPU core only. I haven't used Kicad's simulator yet.

LTSpice is multi-threaded on Windows, but it doesn't make a particularly efficient use of multi-threading, so the difference with single-threaded is not huge.

KiCad uses ngspice, which is rather good but is single-threaded. KiCad only provides a GUI front-end to it.

ngspice can be built for multi-threading, but it's not the version that ships with KiCad or with most official packages of ngspice. I suppose the multi-threaded option is still kinda experimental, and having tried it (building it accordingly), it's only multi-threaded for parts of the simulator and is not particularly efficient either. I didn't notice a significant boost in simulation speed.

You can also try Qucs on Linux. Development seems to be lagging a bit though.

[JohanH]

When embarking on a project I try to keep in mind what the goal of the project is. The idea was to be able to perform all my daily tasks independently of the microsoft ecosystem. So the OS should be stable, simple and well maintained. Only a couple of programs haven't worked for me (the RPM version didn't, but flathub versions did).

Yes, works really well in recent years. Keep in mind that Fedora, at least in the past, had the reputation of being a bleeding edge distribution. And it still is, so there might be quirks in obscure places. For instance, I wanted to use EQ profiles for my headset, so I installed "easyeffects" equalizer that can load preset EQ sound profiles (profiles are available to download for virtually any headset or headphone). At least on Xorg, the flatpak is broken due to some gtk4 issues (dialogs get stuck and such). However, the version from Fedora's own rpm repository works fine. The flatpak supposedly works better in wayland, but I haven't tried.

For comparison, I tried a similar software on Windows (Equalizer APO) that can load the same sound profiles and I couldn't get it to work in the short time I tried it. Had to reboot the PC multiple times and finally gave up. This has probably to do with how the sound system works in Linux vs Windows. The software on Linux just hooks up on high level to Pulseaudio and you can turn it on and off and change settings during runtime, whereas on Windows it has to do some low level stuff with sound drivers (at least I got that impression), which needs a reboot for change of settings.

[barelectricbear]

No one uses Xfce here? Its a great minimal desktop like the old Gnome.

Gamers recomendation - Steam:Proton

Nebie distro recomendations
Linux Mint > Ubuntu
CentOS 7 - still a few years till retirement.

Medium user:
Artix > Arch
Alpine

Hard mode:
BSD

[John B]

Small update on the desktop environment:

I've had 2x unsuccessful forays into the KDE plasma environment. It seems to downgrade a lot of packages and I think there was some issue with a QT5 webengine package that was causing some of the KDE packages to quit on login, rendering a few things inoperable, like shut down, reboot and logout functions, changing active windows etc. Apparently others had issues with KDE lately, so maybe I installed at a bad time. However it did highlight to me that GNOME is probably the more reliable environment when updating the Fedora kernel.

On the upside I am feeling more comfortable now with GNOME. It's still a little clunky when dealing with lots of open windows but I might get used to that. Keyboard shortcuts speed up the workflow, but it's still easy to lose whichever window you were on.

Also, a useful tool I've found is called Solaar. It is used to customise Logitech devices. I have an MX Master 3 mouse in which I was able to bind the bind the 2x additional side buttons using Solaar. One is bound as the super key, which brings up the activity overview screen, the other button simulates super+tab (or alt+tab) which functions similar to MS windows where you can select between active programs/windows.

[SiliconWizard]

KDE tends to be a bit less stable than current Gnome, but a lot more featureful. Gnome still drives me crazy for its rigidity and lack of configurability and very minimal features compared to KDE, but it looks clean and is more stable.

For KDE, I would recommend a distribution that has frequent updates - a rolling release ideally, as KDE plasma is more "bleeding edge" and fixes come relatively quickly, but if you are on a distro that will update the desktop environment very infrequently between major versions, then I'd suggest sticking to Gnome or XFCE. I have Arch on my laptop, and had Gnome for a few years, but recently switched to KDE. I find it eons more usable. But in Arch, we get the very latest version of KDE plasma within just a few days.

XFCE is alright, but very minimal compared to KDE as well. So, your pick. IMHO, only KDE at this point is somewhat "on par" with MacOS or Windows in terms of desktop usability.

[DiTBho]

With Gentoo, your computer will spend half of its run time on compiling stuff

Yup, I confirm it, 60% time spent on compiling and re-compiling stuff.