A New Home Linux Machine
After nine years, my old home Linux desktop is finally being retired. It served me well—by far the longest any home computer has lasted without needing replacement—but the fans were showing their age, and the CPU fan would sometimes need a nudge to start after the machine had been off. That could have been fixed, but I also wanted more memory and a faster CPU.
System76 has been on my radar for a while. They sell hardware designed for Linux from the ground up. My previous machine was a custom build that handled Linux well for years, but it had the occasional hiccup—Bluetooth being a recurring annoyance. Having hardware that just works with Linux sounded appealing.
I ordered a Meerkat: a tiny 4.5-inch square box (with a comically large power adapter) packing 32 GiB of RAM, a sizable SSD, and a 4-core/8-thread i5-1135G7 CPU. It arrived with Ubuntu 22.04 preinstalled, and setup was fast and painless. Within a couple of hours of unpacking, I had moved all my daily operations over to it. The monitor, keyboard, and mouse stayed the same—only the computer itself changed. My Bluetooth earphones finally worked without any fuss.
In practice, the new machine is about 33% faster than the old one for the workloads I care about, such as compiling the Go toolchain and medium-sized Rust projects. Doubling the RAM and increasing SSD capacity were welcome upgrades as well. It's not the cheapest option, but it is a pay-for-quality-and-minimum-fuss choice.
An Update Two Years In
As of late 2024, I've replaced the Meerkat after two years of solid service. It still works great but was becoming underpowered for my needs, mainly because it lacks a GPU. Satisfied with System76, I've moved on to a Thelio Mira with an i7-13700K (16 cores, 24 threads, 8P+8E), 64 GiB of memory, and an inexpensive gaming-class Nvidia GPU.
