Ground up Linux PC build

[John B]

I think it's time to move away from Windows, as I've had no interest in updating from windows 8.1

My needs for a PC have become pretty low, mainly internet, media, and tools like KiCAD, FreeCAD, Libre office, simulators etc. Not much gaming anymore, so thankfully I don't have to worry too much about a GPU. Occasional retro gaming. I figure I'll still want some CPU power to do windows emulation to make up for the inefficiency.

So I've been mulling over a Linux build. The main question on the hardware front is compatibility and stability, rather than outright performance.

1) For the CPU, would you pick Intel or AMD? Perhaps a 5000 series AMD?

2) For the GPU I understand AMD Radeon is the way to go?

3) Are there any compatibility/performance benefits to pairing an AMD CPU and GPU?


Then to the distro, I'm fairly sure it's going to be some Debian based one for simplicity and reliability. I was thinking of going with Ubuntu as the easiest choice (plus I see that AMD Radeon has a driver package for them) but I'm open to other suggestions, vanilla Debian even?

[james_s]

While the topic is certainly welcome here, you might have better results from a more dedicated linux/workstation/PC hardware forum. The last time I built a PC was back in 2015 but I found a recipe somewhere that was all stuff known to work well together. There have got to be lists of Linux friendly hardware, although in practice I've found that just about any random desktop PC works just fine. Laptops are a bit more fiddly since they are so tightly integrated.

[xmris]

I m on a 4th gen i3 and linux mint debian works fine, did a lot of distro hopping at the past, just tired to have frequent updates, YMMV of course, I don't have any extreme gaming requirements, retrogaming mainly on real systems (c64+amiga) but emulators of them are working without any issues even on my -low spec- setup.

BTW, make sure your CPU has virtualisation extensions eg Intel VT-x , just in case you will need VirtualBox/VMware. Sometimes is cheaper to get a ex-company/refurbished system that build one by yourself.

[Karel]

Whatever you do, don't select anything from nvidia!
Intel (CPU & GPU) and AMD (CPU & GPU) works fine with Linux.
In your case a CPU with builtin GPU should be fine and saves you the extra cost of a graphics card.

[themadhippy]

recently build a bench pc with a  pentium gold 6405 and 8 g of ram running ubuntu and it  deals with the tasks youve listed just fine, win 10 on a virtual box also seems to be ok,although i aint tested that in anger.No graphics card,just the internal.Total build cost including case and ssd drive was under £200

[Lindley]

Recently got a new laptop with an AMD Ryzen 5500U  with W11 and surprised and pleased at how fast it is.

You could go for a lower spec and cheaper mobo and cpu as generally Linux need far less than Windows, but would suggest you do go for something modern that will support Win 11 as  in the future you may find you need to run Windows eg dual boot, to use a program thats windows only, unless you intend to keep your old pc just for windows ?

Always found Linux Mint, a sport of Ubuntu, very easy to use and has a good and friendly user forum and plenty of general info on how to load things up etc.

[Zucca]

Whatever you do, don't select anything from nvidia!

I am basically slowly abandoning windows as well....

even a Quadro M6000 24GB? Should I sell it?

[John B]

OK, well watch this space for a Ryzen 5950X build.

[JohanH]

I am basically slowly abandoning windows as well....

even a Quadro M6000 24GB? Should I sell it?

They will be fine, if you use Nvidia proprietary drivers. More user friendly distros like Ubuntu and Fedora handle these fine. Mostly. Sometimes there will be issues with upgrades (I haven't had issues in years on Fedora).

[JohanH]

If you start from scratch and only want to use open source drivers, AMD might be a better option. Nvidia is trying to catch up and have recently announced open source kernel modules for their newer chipsets. This will take time, though, before everyone benefits from this. It will benefit both open source and proprietary drivers in the end.

[Whales]

To give you a user's perspective on what open source vs proprietary drivers means:

"Open source" or "in-kernel" drivers: just work, pre-installed.  These are your best option for AMD and Intel graphics but slow & feature-lacking for Nvidia.

"Proprietary Nvidia drivers": have all the features and performance, and at least on popular distros like Mint/Ubuntu they should mostly behave, but historically they break things and Nvidia doesn't GAF. 

Approximately ten years ago AMD started transitioning from its proprietary fglrx driver to the open source radeon driver (ATI started paying their own people to work on it).  It ended years of head bashing unreliability and issues like not being able to update my kernel from ancient versions (which broke other packages/programs).  It's the "right" way to do drivers in Linux, but it's fundamentally incompatible with the traditional big-company driver product mindset.

even a Quadro M6000 24GB? Should I sell it?

Best thing to do is try it, see if your programs and games work ok.  If it's no good then get an AMD card. 

Fun sidenote: you can have both AMD and Nvidia cards installed at the same time and then (eg) delegate a whole card to a virtual machine.  Sometimes useful for machine learning stuff or even full-VM gaming with proper 3d acceleration.

[Zucca]

Best thing to do is try it, see if your programs and games work ok.  If it's no good then get an AMD card. 

interesting stuff Whales, I don't GAF about games... and Arch Linux is very appealing for me.
My first test will be FreeCAD/KiCAD on an Arch Linux box, and see if the M6000 quadro will play well or not.

[Zucca]

OK, well watch this space for a Ryzen 5950X build.

water cooled please

[John B]

I went with the Noctua D15 again, in black of course. I used it on a 10th gen i9 build last year and it's worked well, and is silent unless under CPU load.

Not sure I trust water cooling yet for a long term computer.

[jdwaverly]

Have you considered using VirtualBox to set up a few virtual machines to try things out?
Pluses:
Try out dozens of Linux, Free BSD and even Mac OS builds (and even Windows 7, XP)
Run old OS's with complete piece of mind about being hacked
Instantly restore virtual machines after bad installs, upgrades
No worries about drivers and hardware compatibility (host OS takes care of that).
Easy to try and throw away without messing with boot partitions
Neglibible slow down compared to running on the Iron
FREE
Minuses:
Forget about graphic intensive tasks.
You still have to maintain your Host OS

https://www.virtualbox.org

[Lindley]

My needs for a PC have become pretty low,


OK, well watch this space for a Ryzen 5950X build.

Well not sure what you would buy for a high end performance PC  if your AU$ 1000 5950X cpu  is for a simple linux machine 

[gnavigator1007]

Just a heads up that you'll likely not be able to upgrade the CPU without getting a new mobo

[Nominal Animal]

I'm personally looking at one of the Ryzens (Zen4) on AM5 with integrated graphics.
Ryzen 9 7950X would be Very Nice, but pricey and a bit hottish.  Ryzen 7 7700X is more within my meager budget, and while it doesn't reach the performance of 7950X, it does pretty well in Phoronix' review.

For the motherboard, I avoid Asus for personal reasons, and have been looking at ASRock X670E Pro RS (which is compatible with all Noctua NH-D15 series coolers, and affordable Kingston KF556C36BBEK2-32 (2×16G) memory modules).  For storage, I'm looking at dual Samsung 980 Pro M.2 PCIe 1TB's in mixed RAID0/1 configuration (in Linux, of course), plus mixed SATA stuff for offline/slow storage (including some WD spinny-rust drives even).  Something like Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360 would also be a possibility for a cooling solution here, but it would generate about 40dBA noise, and I'd rather have much less.

There might be some initial driver hiccups with the sound and network drivers (Realtek ALC897 and Dragon RTL8125BG), because you need a newish mainline kernel, and some distros may lag a bit behind, but it isn't a problem for me.  Just mentioning since it is a possibility.

[John B]

Both the Ryzen 7950X and 5950X are similarly priced at the moment, 5950X being a bit cheaper and both can be found well under AU$1000. The 7950X was very tempting, but all the supporting components blew out the budget with questionable benefit. The DDR5 memory is more expensive, though not too much. However the motherboard series I wanted was going to be nearly twice the price of the AM4 version, over $1k, with no components making use of the PCIe 5. The graphics card is only PCIe 4, and the M.2 SSD is PCIe 3.

For me the CPU and mobo are for the life of the computer, so getting a beefy CPU extends it's useful life.

I think if I spent the extra on a 7950X build, I'd probably go crawling back to windows and start gaming again and wasting my life on Cyberpunk 2077 or something 

The hardware is all purchased, so now I'm going back and forth on which distro. If I take the easy route it will be Linux Mint, but I like the idea of a plain distro. Maybe Debian, but I am giving thought to Fedora.

[Nominal Animal]

I'm typing this on Linux Mint, but have used many different ones.  I do recommend getting fast storage and lots of RAM, so you can run stuff effectively in virtual machines.  They're especially good at evaluating different distros and desktop environments/UI toolkits, not to mention testing stuff (since one can checkpoint a virtual machine and revert back to that after testing something, without having to worry about "cleanup" or uninstalling stuff).  Also, they boot/continue in seconds, so even though it isn't on bare metal, it's close enough for me to not notice the difference (except maybe in some very specific cases).

For me, the motherboard is a likely candidate for replacement.  By having future-compatible components, I can upgrade the motherboard if need be.  Or, get another compatible CPU and motherboard, and do a cross-swap, getting a second machine.

As to what is Linux-compatible, nothing beats a real-world test.  Then, one just needs to remember that Linux distributions do not necessarily run the very latest kernels, so testing more than one fresh distribution is a good idea.

[Infraviolet]

If you're looking for Linux flavour advice I can recommend Linux Mint too, all my PCs use it. Wine also works fairly well with it, if you have windows exe software that needs to be run (perhaps 50% of windows software will run under wine, that which doesn't would need windows in a VM). If I needed both Windows and Mint, I'd make Mint the main OS and put Windows in the VM, linux mint has been far more stable and low-maintenance for me than windows ever was back before I swapped. Booting in seconds seems a bit optimistic for a VM, I've always found they boot about as slowly as the OS on the actual computer, but maybe I've just been on relatively low performance hardware, even then the VM runs as quick as the main OS.

[Zucca]

mixed RAID0/1 configuration (in Linux, of course)

ZFS?

[JohanH]

I've been running Fedora on all of my private desktops and laptops permanently since about 2007, when Windows Vista arrived and it was observed to be crap. The previous main desktop was i7 4790k with various Nvidia graphics. Current is Ryzen 5 5600X, Nvidia 1070, various SSDs and NZXT Kraken X62 water cooler (moved from previous Intel setup). The desktop is used for anything from PCB design (KiCAD), some 3D CAD (FreeCAD), some programming, gaming (Steam) to web surfing, movies and music. I would stay away from ZFS until it's permanently a part of some distro (if it ever becomes), unless you want to be stuck tinkering with kernel upgrades etc. BTRFS works nicely and I haven't had issues with it for years. The water cooler was tricky on Ryzen. I had to set a very custom speed profile for it to work.

[Nominal Animal]

mixed RAID0/1 configuration (in Linux, of course)

ZFS?

Not worth the hassle.  Just ext4 on top of LVM.

[DiTBho]

mixed RAID0/1 configuration (in Linux, of course)

ZFS?

Not worth the hassle.  Just ext4 on top of LVM.

yup, it's what I do, but just ext3 or xfs-v3 on the top of LVM 
(it works great!)