Hello,
I built a Win 10/11 gaming computer some years ago and it’s been my main go-to computer that I rely on for everyday computer activities since then. Web browsing, e-mail, word processing, modeling, midi music, etc. (I don’t game much any more.) The computer has a second hard drive that I’m not using at all now, and now that I’m beginning to get familiar with linux, I am considering installing some flavor of linux on that second drive in a dual boot configuration. Who knows? If this works out, I may drop Windows altogether at some point in the future.
Given the following hardware, would Ubuntu Desktop 24.4 likely be a good match? Would there be any problems with the graphics card and the triple monitors?
Motherboard:
Asus Prime B450M-A/CSM AM4 AMD B450 SATA 6GB/s USB3.1 HDMI Micro ATX AMD
AM4 Socket
AMD B450 Chipset
Bios Version 1002 x64
Build Date 03/07/2019
NVMe M.2, USB 3.1 Gen2, DDR4 and Gigabit LAN
LED EC Version AUMA0-E8K4-0101
RAM:
G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR4 2400 (PC4 19200) Desktop Memory Model F4-2400C15D-8GVR
DDR402400 4GBx2
Hard Drive 1:
SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2 2280 250GB PCIe Gen3. X4, NVMe 1.3 64L V-NAND 3-bit MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-V7E250BW
Hard Drive 2:
Toshiba OCZ TR200 Series 2.5" 480GB SATA 64-layer 3D BiCS Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) THN-TR20Z4800U8
Video card:
PNY GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5
VCGGTX10606PB
Monitors (x3):
ASUS VP278QG 27" Full HD 1920x1080 75Hz 1ms 2xHDMI VGA DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync Built-in Speakers SPLENDID Video Modes Flicker-Free Backlit LED Gaming Monitor
Any help or suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks.
I have no experience with triple monitors, but the machine otherwise seems a good match. You might check for any firmware updates for the motherboard, and of course, more memory is desirable, but your SSDs help a lot. It’s easy enough to just burn an install media and try it out before installing anything.
Sounds fine to me. The actual intricacies and nuances will be seen when you test. You can boot the Ubuntu live USB and test the OS there. See what works and doesn’t. Most of the things you listed can be done in Linux
Make sure the Video card is supported by the current proprietary drivers. I only suggest verifying this as I have an older machine with a GT730 I believe and I had to revert it back to the Jammy base (zorin in this case) because the noble proprietary driver dropped support for it. Much older but still a concern. Without the proprietary driver Minecraft ran like a snail.
Of course if you intend to rely on Nouveau then this is a moot point.
Have become a fan of SSD/NVMe drives. How much is used on yours. If 50GB available, you could put / (root) on SSD and either /home or data partition(s) on HDD. Back in XP days I had two data partitions, one Linux & one NTFS for data I wanted to share with Windows.
If fully installing on HDD, make sure drive is gpt partitioned, and that you have ESP - efi system partition on HDD. Default often is to install to existing ESP on first drive, which would be your SSD. I primarily use HDD for backups & test installs. I do note that HDD installs are a bit slower than NVMe drive.
While your specs should fully support Ubuntu, I now like Kubuntu. And others like other flavors. For a bit of time you can experiment with flavors, which have different gui & different default apps. But all apps from all flavors are available in any flavor.