Recommend a Refurbed Business PC

[mickypoo]

Hi All - new to the board. I'm Mick from Australia, nice to meet you.

Looking at buying a refurbished Small Form Factor (SFF) or micro business PC to run/learn CentOS on (i.e. DELL Optiplex, Levono ThinkCentre).

Can anyone recommend a specific model which has played nicely for them?

Worst case, I'll run Ubuntu and CentOS in a virtual machine but it would be great to run it natively.

Thanks for your time!

[TrevorH]

Almost any older hardware will work but you should check its components to see if any are problematic with Linux. For example, avoid any with Intel 82574 network cards which must qualify as possibly the worst piece of hardware that Intel ever made. Check what video card it has to see if there is support for it. Also, beware of stuff that is really cheap, it might be cheap for a good reason!

[paradimethylaminoben]

I work at an establishment that uses Dell Precision T7600 workstations with CentOS 6 and 7.

https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en ... 0/overview

This one was bought around Aug 2013, but are still quite robust. I'm about to try a fresh install of CentOS 8.

[TrevorH]

I'm not sure I'd buy anything from 2013 now...

[mickypoo]

Ended up acquiring a Dell Optiplex 7040. It's a 6th gen i5, so we might be in 2015 or possibly early 2016.

It's working great in CentOS Stream for anyone interested.