I am about to make the switch to Linux fully after a brief test period some time ago. Since you are all most likely more tech savvy than I, I wanted to ask if there were any immediate problems you see with this PC for running Linux Mint. I’m not aware of any, but it wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong.
Any help, advice, or even alternative hardware recommendations are appreciated.
You’ll have fewer issues if you choose a PC with an AMD Radeon graphics card.
I would rather use an AMD graphics card over Nvidia on Linux, because of Nvidia’s attitude towards Linux. Other than that there’s not much to say I think, it’s usually the tiny details that are missing from product pages that can make an impact. There’s no mention of which wireless networking chip it uses for example.
That being said. Chances are really low you’ll run into any hardware that doesn’t work immediately without any drivers and if you do manage to run into issues, there are often workarounds. I’ve installed Linux on many devices, mostly laptops, and I’ve never had real problems.
This PC uses a last-gen CPU which was a value buy before AMD moved to a new platform. It’s basically a budget build at a non-budget price with an overpriced GPU in it. For AMD CPUs, you should look for the 7000 series, and for Intel you’d want the 13000 series.
If you’re up for it, I strongly recommend building your own PC, perhaps getting help from someone if you need it. If not, look for something current-gen so that at the very least there’s an easy upgrade path.
If you’re going Linux, try to find a computer that doesn’t include Windows, since you’re paying extra for the license. For the GPU, AMD is usually the preferred choice for Linux builds since the drivers are open source and built into the kernel. I’d also recommend more RAM, but that’s something that can be upgraded later if it doesn’t fit into your current budget.
I concur with most of this, with one caveat. If you’re going with a Zen4 platform, make absolutely sure you choose a distro that lets you run kernel 6.5+, or else you’ll be having some issues. The main thing in the newer kernels for AMD and Zen4 is the amd-pstate management driver, and a number efficiency and compatibility drivers for things like caching and memory bus. The machine will run okay-ish without, but you’ll get some performance issues, and needless power ramping that just wastes power.
I recently bought an nvidia gpu and I won’t do it again. Forget nvidia and linux. They work together at this moment but very much meh. Proprietary driver and lots of little issues with games. Maybe those also surface with amd but I doubt it.
