I use systemd it’s fine and requires very little extra thought.

https://www.printables.com/model/413074-m720qm920p-baffle-for-cx312b-pro-connect-x-3-card

The wall mount rack is a used ACP Netshelter. I was able to find it on Craigslist a few years ago. The rackmount face plates are custom 3d printed but unfinished as I abandoned the project due to life.

I may, it was a massive work in progress that I never finished because life decided to beat the crap out of me for the last 3 years. I was trying to build a modular system that was 19" and 10" rack compatible and would have storage options as well. In this case its 2x Seagate external drives, and a WD external drive plugged in via USB3 and setup in a CEPH cluster.

Yes thats the MS-A1 which is a great little box but not as flexible as the MS-01. It lacks the PCIe slot, and only has 2x 2.5g Ethernet ports.

You probably wont find the MS-01 used since its not like the Lenovo’s with their mass market deployment as office PCs.

As for price, https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256810143174659.html? I was looking at the barebones since the prices on DDR5 and NVME’s are nuts right now. I have spare NVME drives so all I would need is RAM and I can find it cheaper than the resellers who mark it up when they install it for you.

I have 2 of them with older 6 core CPUs and 32gb each. I also added a 10g SFP card in the PCIe slot so they would have a bit more umph.

For 380 each I would not bother, and I would look at the Minisforum MS-01 as it has built in dual 10g SFPs and dual 2.5g RJ45’s plus a PCIe slot.

https://minisforumpc.eu/products/ms-01?_pos=1&_psq=MS&_ss=e&_v=1.0

at ~80 euro’s more you get more CPU, faster ram if you can find it, more storage, and more networking.

I run teams and Outlook using versions in electron wrappers. For one drive I have to use the web interface to get to the shared storage because our folks don’t know how to set it up and I don’t care enough to figure it out for them.

I have one application that I really need to use that I still can’t get working in Linux but I’m still trying.

Highly doubtful since it’s AMD to AMD.

No.

Honestly moving to a KDE desktop environment along with any well maintained Linux distro will feel like going back to Windows 7 but now with modern powershell

There will always be a few things different like not needing to download apps from websites. But most of the rest will feel normal.

Nearly everything you are talking about is easy and built into the vast majority of desktop linux distributions, and more than a few server ones too!

RDP: Remmina, KDE (windows like Desktop Environment)

Hyper-V: KVM+QEMU, but im going to ask why? There are very few reasons to do full virtual machines these days when you can just run everything as containers.

Plex: Plex

RAID5: use ZFS Z5 or linux mdadm r5. The advantages of ZFS is that you get lots of tools like snapshots, and reslivering which helps prevent bit rot.

Depending on your hardware I would honestly suggest your host OS be Proxmox, and then just run your gaming/personal system as a VM with GPU pass through. Proxmox has all the KVM+QEMU tools and ZFS tools baked in with a good web UI that makes managing these things easier.

zimablade or zimaboard easy setup and casaos or zimaos make selfhosting easy with preconfigured apps/containers mine is an intel quad core with 8gb and pcie 4x slot.

Ahh, I got mine used when a window 11 update “bricked” a lots of them. Rather than do am RMA this guy just got a new one and gave me the old ones saying if I could fix it then I could keep it.

Unbricking was not easy so I can understand why he just replaced it.

Yes it has a USB c port for e GPU and as an input to be a 2nd monitor for a laptop.

It’s not really upgradable as it’s a highly integrated package. But I will have to replace the battery at some point and will let you know.

Yes I got a generic surface pen and it worked out of the box without any tweaking.

I have a minis forum v3 that I use all the time. It’s got decent CPU and GPU for a laptop class.

It competent runs Indy and older games, has reasonable battery life, and the general performance is more than enough for productivity.

Touch screen works flawlessly, accelerometer required some tinkering as did volume control. Thumb scanner was easy to get working. I have not gone back to try getting the IR camera for face detection working.

I would live boot or install side by side another more modern distro before dumping the card. It’s a fine card it just requires effort to get working unlike AMD/Intel.

Good to know that your different distribution works well with your different GPU.

Great but it’s not working out of the box and clearly that was the expectation.

AMD has built in support so no extra steps needed.

Ubuntu has a history of not having the latest kernels and having spotty support for new hardware.

Sure you can fix it but again the out of the box expectation.

We can agree that it should work and can work and I don’t disagree that always suggestions a different distribution is not generally helpful but watching people suffer trying to get Ubuntu working is a sore spot for me.