6 votes

How to build a desktop computer (tower) for Linux with pieces that are easily available worldwide (most especially South-America)?

This post is related and in some part a repetition of my other topic on how to buy a laptop for Linux.

Because I'm in Brazil, many brands and stores that do not ship to my country are out of the question, and even the ones that ship usually cost more than I can pay due to currency exchange rate and shipping costs themselves. What are some universal stores, brands and models that I can probably find on my location, that won't give me much trouble running Linux?

I don't require playing games or top performance (8GB RAM and i5 processor would be the minimum requirements). And SSD would be nice, but, for my budget, it's a plus.

I just need something that is durable and works reliably under Linux, especially when it comes to audio and HDMI output, video graphics adapter support, booting from USB, hibernating, sleeping and power management.

Thanks!

3 comments

  1. [3]
    Octofox
    Link
    Just about anything works in the desktop space. The key things to look for is wifi and gpu. Look up wifi cards that work with linux (probably about 70% do) and for the gpu make sure you get an AMD...

    Just about anything works in the desktop space. The key things to look for is wifi and gpu. Look up wifi cards that work with linux (probably about 70% do) and for the gpu make sure you get an AMD one since the nvidia ones have less stable and proprietary drivers that always seem to break stuff.

    3 votes
    1. [2]
      mrbig
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      Since I won't use it for games, there won't be a dedicated GPU. So I suppose there won't be a problem there. Wifi cards are a common issue with some distributions, but MX Linux seems to work with...

      Since I won't use it for games, there won't be a dedicated GPU. So I suppose there won't be a problem there. Wifi cards are a common issue with some distributions, but MX Linux seems to work with all of them.

      1 vote
      1. crdpa
        Link Parent
        If MX Linux works, probably all of them will work provided you install the correct firmware. The thing with some distributions is that they don't ship with the proprietary firmwares needed for...

        If MX Linux works, probably all of them will work provided you install the correct firmware. The thing with some distributions is that they don't ship with the proprietary firmwares needed for wifi in the installation media because of legal issues, so you have to grab it in other ways.

        Anything for desktop should work fine.

        I usually buy a Asus motherboard and it always worked. Asrock, Gigabyte, MSI, all of them should work. You can grab a Ryzen or Intel i5 with dedicated GPU and it will work with no need for installing anything special.