I admit, my use case is not a typical one. Maybe some readers will see me going on about this and think, "what kind of bourgeois nerd has two primary computers, let alone this many?" But let me preemptively respond to that (which, maybe nobody has actually said yet) with the following bullet points:
- They were cheap
- I am not the best at personal budgeting
- I'm not necessarily looking for advice, here
Now, I'll describe my setups. Over in the Sun Room - an extension to this mid-70s house built by a previous owner, without a ton of mind paid to insulation - is my Gaming Area. I have a large TV, a 4K model that has definitely seen some wear, and hooked up to it is my first primary PC, Brynhildr, a Ryzen 3600-powered gaming machine with 32 GB RAM and an RTX 2070. It's got all the bells and whistles I could justifiably afford, and because it is connected to a large television, I'm able to mostly enjoy it from a recliner from about ten feet away. I do do desktoppy things with this gaming rig, I sort of have to, especially when a game refuses to work and I need to manipulate files. But there are limits to what I can do from an armchair, and there are times when I prefer to have my keyboard on a desk instead of in my lap. Moments where I want to have papers handy, or peripherals that do not work well on a chair arm, like a drawing tablet, a scanner, a hard drive dock, etc. That's where my other primary PC comes in - and which one that is, varies by the day.
As of this writing - literally I'm writing this post from the computer in question - my desk machine is Mimisbrunnr, a refurbished Mac Mini from 2014, an Intel Core i5 4th-gen with 16 GB of RAM, integrated graphics, and a 256 GB SSD. It cost me less than $200. It does most stuff acceptably, it surfs the web, it has enough ports to handle stuff like wired Ethernet and dual monitors and the nice things that a desk computer really needs to do. The added benefit is, because it is a very small computer - roughly 6 inches by 6 inches, and only an inch thick - I can have it sitting on the desk without having to worry too much about not being able to fit other things on the desk, such as paperwork. However, because it is ten years old, it is beginning to suffer somewhat in the day-to-day, especially in trying to queue up streaming video, launch graphics editors, etc. And 256 GB is somewhat of a restriction in terms of breathing room; I can't just dump large files on it to work with, like captured video. It also dual-boots; I got frustrated enough at the state of legacy support in macOS 11.7 that I Boot Camp'd a copy of Windows 10 on to another partition, which makes the disk space issue even heavier. Hence why I keep trying to replace it.
I have a lot of possible candidates to swap the Mini out for something else.
- Sleipnir, a 2019 MSI Modern laptop that has half the RAM but a 10th-gen i5 instead of a 4th-gen, and 512 GB of space. It's got enough space to stomach my entire 256+ GB MP3 library without needing to pull it over the network. Unfortunately, as a laptop, it takes a lot of desk space. I kind of hate its keyboard, that has two backslash keys for some reason, and its touchpad leaves much to be desired.
- Skirnir, The Wonder Craptop, a 2017 Lenovo IdeaPad "Winbook" with an N30x0-series Celeron processor, a whopping 2 GB RAM, and an absolutely staggering 32 GB of eMMC storage. This was given to me for free by a small church group who no longer needed it; it was used exclusively to display Powerpoint slideshows, and had Windows 10 on it, which consumed nearly all of the available storage. I have nuked it and put WattOS R13 (Debian-derivative) on it, which does give it some more storage and RAM to play with. Unfortunately, for reasons unknown, it does not enjoy working with both of my monitors (granted, I do have to use a USB C breakout to have more than the one HDMI output), and because it is so scant on RAM, it has to run Falkon instead of the better-featured Firefox.
- Lettfeti, the laptop that got me through college. It's a 2012/2013 Samsung Ativ Book 2, that originally had Windows 8, 8 GB RAM, a 4th gen Intel i5, and a 1 TB spinning-rust hard drive. I, through great pain and misery, replaced said drive with a 512 GB SSD (because this model doesn't have any quick-access hatches, I had to pop loose about 20 plastic tabs to remove the entire bottom). At present, it runs Haiku, because I'm strange. Haiku runs fine, Falkon exists for it, Quake runs like garbage on it, and it does not acknowledge the HDMI port, so only the internal screen works. It is also massive, as a roughly 17-inch laptop (because I, in my college-going wisdom, really wanted a laptop with an attached numpad). I cannot make it comfortably fit around the monitors on my desk. (Not that it'd matter if said monitors won't even work.)
- A Terryza-brand Intel Compute Stick, a wonderful little 3-inch-long stick that sockets directly into an HDMI port and is powered by an external USB power supply. They managed to fit 2 USB ports and a microSD slot on to it, and it's powered by a dual-core Intel Atom and 4 GB RAM. In its considerable eMMC storage (which I can't remember if it's 64 GB or 128), they've fit an entire copy of Windows 10. I, of course, nuked it and tried installing OpenElec in hopes of it becoming a home media server. This did not pan out due to its flaky WiFi connectivity. I think it'd still be fun to goof around with, but it does not have Desk Machine in the cards unless I can find a decent way to run Ethernet to it. Probably this is going to need a USB hub, which means more crap needs to dangle out of whatever HDMI socket it's stuck into.
- I mean I could also bring back my old gaming rig from, like, 2010, with the Phenom II X4 and all that, but that thing is noisy as fuck, doesn't fit on top of the desk, and puts out a ton of heat.
- Orrrrrr I could keep dreaming and think about getting a used/refurbished/priced-to-move Intel NUC or adjacent. Lenovo ThinkCentres aren't too expensive. HP has something too. TBH the CPU is the real weak link here, with its middling iGPU, but what I'd need the most besides that is better peripheral connectivity. Having multiple HDMIs natively would be very nice, having USB 3 would mean my storage issues aren't such a big problem, and not being an Apple product would make for a much more comfortable time in Windows for when I need to run some program that Wine hates and Apple is actively forbidding me from touching.
Anyway. I'm a long ways off from affording to make more purchases like this, so Mimisbrunnr remains my desk machine du jour until I can get a steady job again, or some more commissions...