Hello gurus!

I'm putting together a work station. What I have, is an Asus KCMA-D8 mb (link to manual page), 2x AMD Opteron 4133 OS4133WLU4DGO CPUs (link to CPU World) and 32 gigs of DDR3 RAM (I think it's Unbuffered Registered ECC.. But I'd have to look again..). I've got it in a case, with a so-so video card for the time being and loads of space for SAS drives. Also just ordered the Pike card and hopefully the button will come with it.

What I would like to ask, is about the best distro option.. What I plan to do with this work station is run blender, gimp, a handful of other graphics applications and for sure RPG Maker MV and possibly GoDot or another equivalent game engine. Also, I'm really digging what I've been reading about KVM over LAN.

Also, what brands are currently good for server power supplies? I've not messed with them much (i.e. at all).. So I have no idea. Online reviews have hosed me in the past.. I don't mind doing my own homework for all the myriad details that are important, but of course I'm open to any knowledge you wish to freely bestow!

(Detail for those of you who might wonder..) My job that I had the entirety of my time here on Linux questions, begging for guidance, is no more. I'm making enough off odd jobs to pay my bills, trying to get into college and for the time being have lots of spare time. Why not pick up a hobby that might make money?

I've been using Debian Stretch for a few years now. I'm *sort of* familiar with how it works, but I'm not opposed to learning new things.

Just a couple of questions/thoughts:

1) You could certainly keep using Debian, it's a good distro overall, especially if you are already familiar with it.

2) You mentioned you were building a workstation but asked about a server PSU. Huge form factor difference if you are talking about a rack mounted server. If you just want a PC power supply with server reliability, that's different.

I can't answer anything about actual server PSUs as I have never dealt with them; just wanted to ask what you meant.

Thanks for replying!

1. That's good to know.

2. The motherboard itself claims to be a server motherboard (in the manual). Again, I don't know squat about servers, so there may be different kinds - I don't know at the moment. I did see that the PSUs I was browsing through where definitely not shaped like the typical PC flavor. It would be Frankenstein, but I wouldn't mind modifying the case to accommodate. Nobody to impress here, lol. I guess a bigger question I should ask myself is what exactly the difference is (other than the size and shape) between a server's power supply and a normal desktop's.

I've noticed over the years that when I go shopping for a motherboard (granted I wasn't looking to build a server), the boards geared towards workstation applications are lumped together with the server ones. Admittedly, I don't know why this is. Another question I should probably ask myself.

When I got this particular part originally, I used it with a normal desktop PSU and it seemed to work just fine. I was curious about the "extra features" of which they didn't get into any specific detail in the manual. The PSU I was using with it has since been re-purposed, so I have to get another one anyway. I thought, why not see about this nifty difty server PSU business?