I been tossing around for years but never actually done it.
I use linux in a VMworld daily (mostly LINUX MINT, to me i dont need all the eye candy, i just like the fact it works when i need it to) i have a laptop i do all my banking on with linux .. but NO real desktop to say.. (i use that laptop for trying various distros)

so I am really considering this for a dedicated FULL LINUX PC.. semi older build i have laying around. This will be mostly used for internet/banking/some videos/ some kind of NAS/ftp server perhaps(yes i still enjoy a good FTP server) a place to backup my windows machines.
perhaps i will reverse this process and vm windows onto this machine.
I want to start trying to use this as a daily driver and leave my winblows machine for gaming only.. as really thats all its good for.. well that and converting my old DVDs to ISOs or MPG files , but i should be able to do that with linux.

AMD FX8350
Gigabyte FX990-UD5 series board.
16GB DDR3
nvidia GTS 8800 (not looking to play heavy games)
1 DVDRW
1 TB SSD
5x 1 TB HDDs

any thoughts? Im not looking to win any races. this is a machine i have laying around that is doing nothing I upgraded from that to a Ryzen system for my gaming rig so this still has windows but i want to scrap that for a dedicated workstation

My 'daily' use box is a Celeron, 4GB ram, 240GB M2 SSD - more than ample specs for normal use - I use Devuan XFCE on it.

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Mint with XFCE will easily run on what you describe. I have two machines with 8 Gb (one of which is an old Mac that crApple has declared EOL) and two with 4 Gb. Mint/XFCE runs just fine on them. Forget KDE since it's too bloated.

I wouldn't go any lower than 4 Gb, though. Not in 2023. I have one ancient (2009) netbook with 1 Gb that barely runs Slackware 14.2 and won't run 15.0. I think that one is headed for the scrap-heap. A Raspberry Pi is more powerful than that relic.

appreciate your thoughts, I am a mint fan, usually Mint Mate` is my choice and that would probably go onto that system, but ill keep XFCE in mind.

never heard of Devuan

1 members found this post helpful.

+1 for Devuan and for XFCE.

Devuan is basically Debian but cleaned of the tangled, growing, insecure mess that is systemd.

XFCE is more customizable than the desktop environments, once you get past the defaults, at least as far as details go. I mention it because I noticed today just how many tweaks I've made to it to make it so much comfortable for my use than Cinnamon or MATE could ever be. KDE might be even more customizable if you know Qt, however.

If you have multiple hard drives, you might look at making an OpenZFS pool with RAIDZ or RAIDZ2. There are several advantages to OpenZFS. One is that it has file-level error correction, in addition to device redundancy. Another is that you have file system snapshots. You can then serve that over both SMB and SFTP.

I hope the string "FTP" was a typo and that you meant SFTP. You can do file sharing both safely and easily with SFTP but not FTP. Most (all?) of any distro's file managers are going to support it out of the box: press ctrl-L and then enter the URL for the other machine, such as sftp://mperu99@203.0.113.216/home/mperu99/Documents/ Then once connected you can transfer files graphically just like if they were local. As a bonus, with SFTP you can safely use the same methods over the Internet as well to access the home machine while away. Though it is a good idea to use SSH key based authentication for that and turn off password authentication