[TriLUG] Ideas for Replacing Home Office Workhorse Computer?

[Roger W. Broseus via TriLUG]

Scott,

Thinkpads are the road warrior's pal. End-of-hear sales / clearances could 
save you some bucks. I got one last year at 1/2 price for a 2017 version. 
Check Lenovo's web site for deals, clearances, etc. X-1 Carbon's are toughest 
and I saw a "super" Thinkpad discussed a couple of weeks ago: $$$.

I can't speak to virtual machines since I have not used 'em for a few years. 
My old Thinkpad did okay with Virtual Box. My bet is you'd be okay since many 
developers use Thinkpads.

--
Roger W. Broseus - Linux User
     Email: RogerB at bronord.com
     Web Site: www.bronord.com

On 12/17/18 5:05 PM, Scott Chilcote via TriLUG wrote:
> 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.
>
>