[TriLUG] Ideas for Replacing Home Office Workhorse Computer?

[Scott Chilcote via TriLUG]

Hello all,

My home office computer is getting long in the tooth.  It's an
all-aluminum mac pro from 2007, has eight 2.8 GHz cores, and has been
upgraded over the years to 24 GB of memory and SSD drives.

I use this box to run vmware guests with vmware fusion, and with as many
as four running at the same time.  It has been great for this purpose,
being wonderfully quiet and with scant evidence of bogging down. 

About the only thing that I'd knock is that it puts out significant
heat.  Since my office is on the south side of our house, I needed a
room AC to reduce operating the whole-house unit from May through September.

Apple Corp decided that I'd owned this computer long enough in 2015,
when they discontinued it from subsequent releases of MacOS.  VmWare
soon followed suit, as their updates and releases no longer support the
terminal version of the OS. 

The machine still worked fine until a couple of months ago, when it
decided to start having random spontaneous reboots.  There haven't been
that many yet, fewer than ten, but the writing's on the wall.  Guest
OSes are not happy with having their power slammed repeatedly, and in
particular those made by Microsoft.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about what to replace this box with. 
I'm not in love with Apple by any means.  Their most recent incarnation
of the Mac Pro is kind of old, and seems more appropriate for an art
museum than a home office (as the meme says, change my mind! ;-) 

The machine I would like to get will be powerful and quiet, and not pour
out a lot of heat when idling.  Some gaming-specific hardware comes
close, but I don't have much use for the high end graphics or blue LEDs.

I'm wondering if I need to buy a new vmware license to switch to another
host operating system (for example, Linux).  I managed to get one of
these guests to run on virtualbox once, on my ubuntu laptop.  It was not
particularly reliable, and I had to reinstall it after it hung once or
twice.  That was years ago, however.  It would be good to know if
there's a virtual host for Linux that runs vmware guests reliably.

If any LUGgers have experience with hardware and host OS setups that fit
these objectives, please pass the word.

Many thanks!

Scott C.


-- 
Scott Chilcote
scottchilcote at ncrrbiz.com
Cary, NC USA