I have a remote PC station that is a refurbished machine with the follow specs:

Lenovo ThinkCentre A62, Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2, 5200B 2700Mhz 1MB, RAM 8192MB DDR2, 250 GB SATA, can boot from USB, but has no CD/DVD device.

I bought that because I needed to setup a remote pc station running 24/7 a Windows based financial platform. I don't like any Windows OS that is not daily restarted so I decided I should run that Windows software with wine on Linux.

I need to run a few instances of that platform and one of its current functions is to mine price data, recording every minute the prices of about 150 major stocks.

I have some experience using Linux workstations (mainly Ubuntu) so I set up that remote PC with Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" - Cinnamon (64-bit) which is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

The remote PC has been running for 2 months now and I started to notice a few problems. It turns out that a Linux desktop system is not so stable as I expected.

I began running under wine 2 instances of the financial platform and the CPU usage was on average 80-85% which seemed to me a lot given the fact that this platform is really light on Windows {should have been written in about 2005 or even before that}.

When I started the price mining in a third instance without restarting the OS, the CPU load went to over 90% and in 2-3 hours after I left it to run on its own, the PC crashed. When I restarted the system, the 3 instances loaded the CPU to about 80-85%.

Apart from the platform instances I need to have an open web browser running a single web page which I use to login into my internet account. The PC also runs a script that attempts to reconnect the internet on its own.

I think I made a mistake using a typical desktop Linux distribution that is not really intended to be light on somewhat older hardware. I might have been better off installing some Ubuntu server version {or another Linux server} and adding some lightweight window manager / desktop environment on top of it.

What would you have done if you were in my shoes?

Debian is about as stable as stable gets. I normally would have also recommended CentOS, but Red Hat has decided to start mucking with it.

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I'd focus on security distro. Might even go with OpenBSD or a commercial linux.

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About 15 years ago I tried setting up Debian and couldn't do it. CentOS is not an option anymore but I am very excited about Rocky Linux and hope they will make a release soon. I am considering becoming a Rocky Linux contributor.

Would you recommend a security distro that is fairly easy to set up and will run OK on a dual CPU PC. For instance Qubes OS is considered top security OS nowadays but it has somewhat higher hardware requirements. Do you think Kali Linux is a good option?

Apart from wine I need to setup python as a mini conda environment, java-jdk and two libraries that I use for my internet re-connection script {for sikulix platform} opencv & tesseract. Hope those won't be a real problem for any mainstream security distro.

Btw, jefro, love your signature comment

Honestly? Slackware-current. Start by installing Alien Bob’s multilib packages. You can keep WINE as current as you want using the build script from SlackBuilds.org.

And next time CPU spikes are a problem, use a program called. “htop” to determine what’s responsible.

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I'd advise MX Linux. That's basically a customised Debian Stable with the Xfce desktop, which is lighter than Cinnamonand far lighter than Debian's standard of Gnome. Incidentally, Cinnamon is not always stable — Clem does warn you on the Mint website.

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I can't say what is easy. If you know Centos then consider Red Hat. They offer it under some free version.
OpenBSD is easy if you know it.

Anytime I see financial I think security.

The sig is a rant because the mess in Texas last week. I'm sure there is blame to go around but it was a record cold that I've never seen.
On top of that 2 ice storms and two snowfalls. My rain water collection tanks froze solid. They've never even gotten close to being frozen.
My all electric bill for that month..... $133 I guess that isn't terrible but my heat pump wasn't rated below 10 degrees.
Only 3 of the 4 nuclear plants were online and half of the regular plants. Wind farms and solar all shut down. Texas has closed quite a number of existing plants in the last 15 years with no gains.
I charge my electric car at night. That usually means nuclear.

A 6500W gas generator kept my wife I warm and able to melt snow for toilets and cook food on. It's easy to warm chili on an induction cooktop portable unit.

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Thanks for the suggestion! MX Linux is the top most downloaded distro on distrowatch.com so I should have come to this idea on my own.

Hm, hm, seems I am getting "slacked". Unfortunately Slackware-current is out of my reach {I might need weeks or months to make it work properly}. But there are two Slackware-based distros, Absolute Linux and Salix that seem reasonable enough to try out.

For now I think I should try to reproduce the current Linux Mint system in a virtual machine and compare it to three VM-s with MX Linux, Manjaro and Kali Linux with the same characteristics. Hopefully one of those would show a lower CPU load. Next in line stand LXQt/LXDE Fedora and LXLE/Lubuntu. If I don't get any significant improvement on any of those I'll start to look for a more customized solution (something like Arch Linux, Slackware-based or FreeBSD/OpenBSD).

Another possibility is to play with the wine versions or the wine setup. I wonder if I can get better performance with an earlier wine version (like 3.0 or 4.0 vs the more recent 5.0 & 6.0).

Anyway this is the plan for now

Salix is very nice — I used to have it on a lap-top. But it's based on Slackware's stable repository, so it's several years old. When Slackware 15 finally staggers out, then the Salix team will start to produce their version — some time yet, I fear.

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Bolded a few lines above for emphasis only. Like you, I prefer Linux over anything else, but in your case I'd suggest NOT using it, and running Windows instead. You say yourself that the load on that app should be low, but Wine is obviously working pretty hard to make it happen.

Since you asked what I'd do if I was in your shoes, I'd run Windows....use the right tool for the job. I understand the sad nature of Windows security and how clunky it is, but in this case, you're running a Windows app. Run it on Windows. Get a cheap PC, set it on its own network away from your other systems and let it rip. I know it's not really what you asked, but given the app and what it's doing, it seems to make sense.