Yikes, that sucks… but at least Linux is still usable.

If you want stability, you probably can’t beat Debian, and you should be fairly used to the backend by now. I suspect the stylus use is just going to be figuring out what package provided your current access to it.

Before you wipe the laptop, I would recommend finding a command to list all the installed packages, then at least you’ll have a reference to what was in place before. And if possible, maybe grab a backup of the /etc folder (or whatever might still be accessible) so you can reference the current configs on various packages to recreate whatever doesn’t work by default.

There are a number of lightweight desktops you can choose from. I personally like Mate, but maybe you can play around with others on the new system and purge the ones you don’t like. And while you’re swapping drives, check the memory slots, maybe you can drop another 8GB stick in there to give the whole system a boost.

You might check if a simple CPU upgrade would get you there. I previously ran some 2005 Poweredge servers that came with a Pentium D processor, and it cost me something like $8 from ebay to upgrade to a Xeon and start running KVM.

Keep an eye out for people trashing perfectly good desktop machines because Windows 10 is being retired.

If you want a server that “does it all” then you would need to get the most decked-out top of the line server available… Obviously that is unrealistic, so as others have mentioned, knowing WHAT you want to run is required to even begin to make a guess at what you will need.

Meanwhile here’s what I suggest – Grab any desktop machine you can find to get yourself started. Load up an OS, and start adding services. Maybe you want to run a personal web server, a file server, or something more extensive like Nextcloud? Get those things installed, and see how it runs. At some point you will start seeing performance issues, and this tells you when it’s time to upgrade to something with more capability. You may simply need more memory or a better CPU, in which case you can get the parts, or you may need to really step up to something with dual-CPU or internal RAID. You might also consider splitting services between multiple desktop machines, for instance having one dedicated NAS and another running Nextcloud. Your personal setup will dictate what works best for you, but the best way to learn these things is to just dive in with whatever hardware you can get ahold of (especially when it’s free), and use that as your baseline for any upgrades.

My current desktop came from a co-worker, but you can also put the word out to family and friends that you’re interested in their old machines. Most people are happy to give them away because otherwise it costs them money to dispose of electronics. If nothing else, you could post on Nextdoor or a local Facebook page that you’re looking for a Win10 machine that would otherwise be trashed.

Older machines also mean dirt-cheap upgrades. The desktop I have came with a Celeron cpu. I dropped in an i7 for $10 from ebay, and recently upgraded it to 24GB of ram with sticks I had pulled from other free systems. When you switch to Linux you’re not wasting horsepower on Microsoft spyware crap, so this machine does just fine for my needs (although I’m also not trying to play games).

Especially Win10 computers :-)

Ah that’s good. Disk space isn’t an issue here, I have around 105TB of storage, but my desktop is an older machine with only 24GB of memory so being lightweight is somewhat of a requirement.

Agreed on Debian stable. Long ago I tried running servers under Ubuntu… that was all fine until the morning I woke up to find all of the servers offline because a security update had destroyed the network card drivers. Debian has been rock-solid for me for years and buying “commercial support” basically means paying someone else to do google searches for you.

I don’t know if I’ve ever tried flatpaks, I thought they basically had the same problems as snaps?

I’m not sure about other distros, I’ve just heard a lot of complaints about snaps under Ubuntu. Cura was the snap I tried on my system that constantly crashed until I found a .deb package. Now it runs perfectly fine without sucking up a ton of system memory. Thunderbird is managed directly by debian, and firefox-esr is provided by a Mozilla repo so they all get installed directly instead of through 3rd-party software (although I think I tried upgrading Firefox to a snap version once and it was equally unstable). Now I just avoid anything that doesn’t have a direct installer.

That’s what I was thinking too… If they’re running Ubuntu then they’re probably installing packages through snaps, and that’s always been the worst experience for me. Those apps lag down my whole system, crash or lock up, and generally are unusable. I run Debian but have run into apps that wanted me to use a snap install. One package I managed to find a direct installer that is rock-solid in comparison to the snap version, and the rest of the programs I abandoned.

Firefox (since it was mentioned) is one of those things I believe Ubuntu installs as a snap, despite there being a perfectly usable .deb package. I applaud the effort behind snap and others to make a universal installation system, but it is so not there yet and shouldn’t be the default of any distro.

But why doesn’t it ever empty the swap space? I’ve been using vm.swappiness=10 and I’ve tried vm.vfs_cache_pressure at 100 and 50. Checking ps I’m not seeing any services that would be idling in the background, so I’m not sure why the system thought it needed to put anything in swap. (And FWIW, I run two servers with identical services that I load balance to, but the other machine has barely used any swap space – which adds to my confusion about the differences).

Why would I want to reduce the amount of memory in the server? Isn’t all that cache memory being used to help things run smoother and reduce drive I/O?

And how does cache space figure in to this? I have a server with 64GB of RAM, of which 46GB is being used by system cache, but I only have 450MB of free memory and 140MB of free swap. The only ‘volatile’ service I have running is slapd which can run in bursts of activity, otherwise the only thing of consequence running is webmin and some VMs which collectively can use up to 24GB (though they actually use about half that) but there’s no reason those should hit swap space. I just don’t get why the swap space is being run dry here.