If you have a computer repair place near you just go there and say “I have $100 and I want to trade it for a motherboard, cpu and cooler that fits in this case and takes this ram.”

They’re gonna have an old 8th gen + intel or am4 setup that will work for you.

How much you looking to spend?

Oh I didn’t even look up motherboard availability, I only know of dual core no multithreading celeron lga 1200 CPUs. You’re gonna have problems accomplishing your goals with that.

Not in the openrgb device list?

What package did you end up going with?

Sounds like you’re all set. Good luck!

You’re plenty tech minded. Probably just pick Debian or fedora and have fun till it starts pissing you off.

You need to use a computer to make a bootable usb drive you can use to install linux.

“When you have a staff, I will give it to you. If you have no staff, I will take it away from you.” —Basho osho

What usb are you gonna use, what computer will you use to make it into a linux install drive?

Hell yeah, just try some shit.

What’s the best computer experience you remember having? Mine is writing BASIC programs on an old tandy as a little kid.

No one can tell you the answer to the first part of the question you asked but it doesn’t matter because the solution is to just try different shit till you stop.

The installation process is 1. Back up all the stuff you don’t want to lose 2. Download an iso and write it to a usb 3. Boot the usb and play a dating sim with a computer to see what ending you get.

When you switch computer operating systems you’ll have a bunch of problems and questions which are all related directly to how you use the computer. Only you can realize to what extent and in what way you’ve abstracted or personified your experience of using the computer. Only you can decide if you want to stand astride the tracks of history and say “no further”, retvrn to your people’s traditional ways of knowing or eliminate all your cerebral folds and embrace one giant electron native touchscreen button simply marked “dopamine”.

No, you’re wrong.

People who still feel like they aren’t being coddled enough when it comes to linux help in the year of our lord 2026 are the toxic ones. Assistance with every possible problem exists in every imaginable format and with focus on a dazzling array of backgrounds and levels of comprehension.

At some point when you’re set loose in the library and can’t find out about locomotive axle layouts it’s your own fault.

If your case can mount the sata drives and your power supply has a 24 pin, four pin and enough sata connectors for your drives then all you need is a ddr4 motherboard, cpu and cooler.

If you’re stuck on off the shelf stuff then maybe a b550 and some am4 cpu, if you can mess around with weird shit there’s a bunch of odd sample intel cpu/motherboard combos floating around the aliexpress sphere.

Some of the am4 boards have multiple nics so that’s probably worthwhile for your use case.

No, fuck you.

If you want to use the community computer you have to actually put forth the effort to learn how to do it. There is no excuse in 2026, vast mountains of educational material in every format written for every combination of medium and cognition are available at an instant.

From your perspective it would be easier and more efficient if people made videos, or talked you through it. From everyone else’s perspective it’s a big waste of time when they could be doing literally anything else and you will end up with a stronger understanding when you do it yourself.

That’s not to say people won’t help you, just that you should put forth the effort to learn so you don’t burden the community, such as it is, with your simple requests.

Alternately, you don’t have to use linux. Windows is a perfectly good operating system, macos is a perfectly good operating system.

wget -a website.url

It’s probably better not to try to preserve webcomics. It’s like the only bad form of art.

For what you’re suggesting using it for there isn’t much point in paying for the faster hotter chip.

It’s unlikely you’ll be able to decode 4k if you end up going that route with the 2014.

here’s someone who installed linux on one.. If you need WiFi make sure you understand how to add the Broadcom module into the kernel.

The 2014 minis are all dual core haswell CPUs so don’t bother with the hotter i7 versions. You can’t upgrade the ram so buy what you need.

If you’re in Europe often the hp elitedesk is a used pc of note. The elitedesk 800 g4 specifically may be a better option since the sff ones can already have bd drives built in, can take extensive internal storage upgrades (2x nvme, 2x 3.5, 1x 2.5) and will have a four core eighth generation intel processor 99% of the time which makes 4k within reach.

Kodi is the media system package used by a lot of linux systems. Libreelec is a linux distribution that focuses on running kodi.

If your stereo has hdmi you can just plug one into the other and hear movies and tv sound through the stereo, if not then you’ll will need to do some kind of input switching to listen to music using the 3.5mm jack and movies using sound over hdmi.

E: don’t worry about power efficiency. Even the 2014 Mac you’re looking at is able to turn stuff off at the processors clock tree and idles at a low enough draw to not worry about.

It works for at least some of them, because I just did it with a uupdump.

What a grand and intoxicating innocence!

Dd if=windows10.iso of=/dev/usbdevice bs=4096

You’re 100% right and I’m glad you’ve made this post.

Haters will vote you down but they aren’t running the dodi cbp repack.

If you follow the git instructions linked in another thread, make sure to slowly move through major version numbers. You most likely will not be able to jump straight to 25 and will need to step through major versions to figure out what changed and how to fix it.

Once you can make sure newer packages will work with the nonstandard gpu you’ll have some chance of doing htpc stuff.