From: bowman@montana.com   
      
   On Sat, 14 Feb 2026 14:44:17 -0500, Joel W. Crump wrote:   
      
   > After what NVIDIA did to my beloved self-assembled desktop, admittedly   
   > with my own carelessness factoring in, I would never give them a penny,   
   > again.  Then again, I wouldn't even build a computer again, these mini   
   > PCs from China are great to run Linux on, not even that bad for running   
   > Winblows, but fuck spending a fortune on PCs anymore, I have 16 GB RAM   
   > and 512 GB storage, for the purchase price of $190, with a Win11 Pro   
   > license if I ever want that back (which I won't, but hey).  The new era   
   > is here.   
      
   Time goes by...  I bought a Beelink mini as an experiment over 5 years   
   ago. It's been running Ubuntu happily ever since. It was $389 but has a   
   Ryzen 7 processor. It has AMD Radeon graphics, good enough for what I do   
   and it's saved me a lot of time screwing around with Nvidia drivers. At   
   the time Intel was still doing the NUC but the market has taken off since   
   then with a lot of cheaper and more expensive variants.   
      
   I have a nice Antec case that screams for a build. The last time I gave it   
   any serious thought I decided I could buy a Dell cheaper than I could do a   
   build since I wasn't aiming at a high end gaming machine.   
      
   The minis are also giving the RPi a run for the money unless you really   
   need the GPIO capability.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)