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Old office firesale OEM Dell optiplex 5040 w/ i7 -6700 chipset
Upgraded with extra ram and nvme. No GPU.
Dual monitor setup (one 5:4 for that pre 2010 vibe)
Mint with Cinnamon. Programs - Yoshimi, CMUS, xed, htop and Ollama running Llava:7b in cool-retro-term.
They aren't wrong IMO - if you don't do anything that requires a lot of processing power or really need a lot of slots for peripherals, PCI cards and drives, you might as well connect your external display, keyboard and mouse to a laptop. It gives you the option to take the entire thing with you, and a lot of people have spare laptops anyway.
I know plenty of people who don't even use their laptop much because they're doing everything on their phones or game consoles.
Yes and no. Use case is the great definer here. This machine has been, and still is, many things; NAS, router, media server, server server, karaoke machine. Hell I even fell for that Chia Coin bingo card bullshit for about a month years back, and pressed it into service to 'farm' that with a big old ugly Noctua cooler sticking out of the open case.
Actually that's a good example bc doing that shit fried the RAM and if I had been using a laptop with so-dimm and soldered it would have likely grilled the whole board.
At the moment it's set up on a work bench desk in a corner of the drawing room where everyone in the household can finger fuck the screens if they wish and I don't have to worry about it . When kids ask if they can play games on it they either get gzdoom or mame or sent away disappointed.
Also it is silent. I love silent computers.
Thank you but no.