Got a new mini PC. What should I do with it?

Nostalgia hit me the other day while watching a random YouTube video of a guy building a PC. This and the fact that I’ve been toying around with the idea of getting a small computer for my desk at home led me to make an impulsive purchase of this little ASRock A300.

It’s absolutely brilliant with size comparable to the original mac mini, maybe even smaller. Not entirely sure of the exact purpose of this build, I picked up the Ryzen 3200G, 16G of memory, the cheapest 250GB solid state drive I could find from Scan, a wifi card, and a Noctua slim fan.

Now the parts have arrived and I’ve put them together. Honestly it feels like Christmas came early. Popping the processor box and unscrewing the back plate of the case - all the joyful memories from my childhood came rushing back!

I am still unsure what exactly am I going to use this for. I was thinking to maybe hook it up to the TV and use it as media center, but I already have a TV Box for that which I don’t watch anyway. Maybe a replacement for the PiHole and HomeAssistant servers so I can free up the pi for something else?

I know what - I’ll give linux desktops a butchers. It would be interesting to see how far the linux desktop has come since I last used OpenSuse about 10 years ago. Most of the tools I use to code are cross platform and everything runs on Docker these days anyway, so how hard can it be?

There are some new distros out there that I haven’t even heard of. Lots of choice, as it typically is with linux, and no time to waste. Let’s go download some ISOs :)