Hello, > I'm thinking of purchasing parts to an all-purpose *BSD personal > computer. My budget is ~€3000 (+1k). Ideally I would like it not too > noisy while staying as cool as possible (I live in a studio), and > dual screen monitor (I'm thinking of one HD screen to also watch > movies on and one square screen on the left for the console).
This is very personal to you, everyone has their own preference on doing things. Some people are happy with just a laptop, some people like one big monitor, some people like 2-3 smaller monitors tiled together in different ways depending on their workload. You got to experiment and see what you like. > First thing is the motherboard, processor, and RAM. Here also lies the > bottleneck : is there a motherboard/processor combo that can host > all four BSD's and derivatives ? If I'm not mistaken, I think the > blowfish does not maximally exploit multi-core processor, so a quad > core (for instance) is enough. It'd also be great to have it without > MINIX's IME/PSP, but I know this is asking too much ! Or is it ? I have two comments on this. Firstly, the specs you need is based on your workload, nobody here is able to answer this or give any advice without knowing what sort of work you do. Also companies are always selling off old desktops, old being 8th/9th gen currently afaik, these are still solid systems but wouldn't run Windows fast enough for companies, slapping BSD these will make them run FASSSTTT. Good way to save money than building an entirely new computer. Secondly, for IME disabling you will need an older device, older intel bootguard has been recently cracked by a libreboot contributor and Dell Optiplex 3050 Micro has been ported [1], this is the newest device which can run coreboot/libreboot. There is also a select number of motherboards which can be corebooted/librebooted with me disabled. [2] Custom boot payloads can cause issues though, so make sure you check if there is any drawbacks for whatever you want to flash before doing so. > There's a long time since I haven't proerly hacked and built my own > tower, I don't remember all particular caveats of the best > optimisation. Suffice to say the computer hacking's main use would be > to compile, fetch various things from the network (no brainer, right > ?), as well as, more touchy, embedded / RISC-V development (hence > connectics). If you haven't built a pc before then maybe upgrading a decommissioned office pc would be better? However this is entirely on your use case. > Then I would also browse the web and use Word. > > Haha. Just kidding. But I'd like to watch a movie at times and have a > good HD screen and 5.1/7.1 speakers for that (the latter can come > later). Literally any device made in the last 15 years could do that, maybe the older ones wouldn't be able to play 4k video, but it sure can do lower resolutions. As long as you upgrade the memory on older devices (web browsers eat a lot of memory) and stick a SSD in (HDDs have slow random IO so can be annoying for desktop use). As for word, please consider using a different implementation [3]. > In terms of ergonomics, I already have an all-black basic keyboard, > as well as a small bépo one, and am thinking particularly of the > mechanical and TypeMatrix keyboards. Someone advised an incurved > monitor as well as blue light filter. I don't know much about mices, > but I have short hands (I'm 5"3). Personal preference again, nobody can help you with this, you got to figure this one out on your own. Take care, -- Polarian GPG signature: 0770E5312238C760 Jabber/XMPP: polar...@icebound.dev [1] https://libreboot.org/docs/install/dell3050.html [2] https://libreboot.org/docs/install/#desktops-amd-intel-x86 [3] https://www.libreoffice.org/
