From: Steve Petrie via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
Although I did build the desktop PC with the mother board that is now failing, I'm not going to build the replacement PC. Building will take too long and the expert friend who helped me with the build is to busy to help me with another build.
Makes sense. There may be some salvage value in your old system.
So, I will buy a pre-built PC.
Seems that Lenovo certifies their desktop PCs for Ubuntu linux but they nave compatibility problems with Debian linux.
I find very few compatibility problems with the PC's I've tried. Laptops can be a little trickier because they have so many integrated functions. Do I remember that you have a card that you want to install in your system? If not, I'll recommend a mini PC. I used to only buy "ordinary" tower PCs but I have switched to a Bee-link SER7 mini PC. Before that, my wife switched from an old HP Small Form Factor PC to a Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q "tiny". Downside: little expansion capability other than RAM and disk. In particular, no discrete GPU. Upside: small footprint. My wife's SFF never had a card installed, so that capability didn't matter. Similarly, the only expansion card in my (10 year old) PC was a video card to drive my UltraHD monitor (something that these mini PCs can do well enough without a video card). My mini PC came with a 2.5Gb/s ethernet port (two, actually). My wife's ThinkCentre only has a 1Gb/s ethernet port, but that's fine. The ThinkCentre is better built than the Bee-link but I don't see how that matters. Lenovo support (firmware updates) goes on for many years. Lenovo prices swing wildly. You can often find a 40% discount from Think* list prices. I don't see a good price now. This is the Bee-link on my desktop: <https://www.amazon.ca/Beelink-7840HS-Desktop-Computer-Display/dp/B08V54W7W9/... I paid less for it 16 months ago, from Amazon.ca. Odd. Especially since it has bee superseded by the SER8 series. Good luck!