You’ll be fine, make sure it’s a x16 card (vasty majority are), stick it in your x16 slot. Make sure you have enough power, some are pretty thirsty these days (it’s usually on the specs sheet for the card and on your power supply in the case)

You can also upgrade the CPU to AMD Ryzen 3000 series (e.g. 3900X, pretty cheap second hand) by upgrading the BIOS here for a nice performance uplift. Get to at least 16Gb RAM (DDR4, also cheap).

Later, you can recycle this as a home sever or swap to a motherboard that supports Ryzen 5000 series (also cheap these days), which will take all your present hardware and enable CPU upgrade to say 5800X3D to make it a gaming beast (at least for a couple of years).

Like they won’t be selling to all the insurance companies… One would’ve been better.

Yarr !, my experience has been stellar ;) (Gaben: It’s a service problem…)

know truth from fiction.

You jest, but…

You are aware that Netflix et.al. put compression on their streams (usually quite a bit in regards to bitrate) ? It is often the case that BluRay rips etc. are available better on the high seas…

While I generally agree and consider this insightful, it behooves us to remember the (actual, 1930s) Nazis did it with newspapers, radio and rallies (… in a cave, with a box of scraps).

Not sure I’d use either, but may I suggest both, with a clear caveat that one or both may disappear or change ? Throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks…

If that’s all you’re after (Contact, Calender, Drive) you may well be able to just plug a hard drive into your OpenWRT router (it has https://openwrt.org/packages/pkgdata/radicale2 which does caldav and carddav), work out sharing (apparently at least samba works) work out how to back up the drive (plug in two, mirror and unplug one, RAID is not a backup) and call it a day. I don’t have one, but it seems likely doable… Tailscale in when you’re out and about…

Thinkpads have long had first tier linux support, in fact many models have shipped with linux for at least a decade (?), checking that is a really good way to be sure, but you’re going to be fine with W, P, T, X lines, many enthusiasts make light work. They were deployed (might still be) to Red Hat kernel devs for a long time, which helps things along. Fingerprint drivers tend to be proprietary and hit or miss, but passwords work.

Honestly learning to install linux yourself, and configure it to your liking, is actually, imo, a really important path to learning and you’re likely doing yourself a disservice avoiding it. It’s part of the avoidance of vendor lock in you want. Installation is surprisingly easy now, start with something simple, Mint is often recommended these days, find a decent, recent, youtube and you’ll probably be up and running in an hour. Find the apps you need for your workflow (which will take considerably longer). Get familiar with the terminal. Best thing you can do after that is burn it down and install a new distro, leaving any mistakes behind, keeping your list of apps. Arch if you want to get really deep into it, or Fedora / Bazzite are good choices and very stable. Best of luck.

I replied to @muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee and understood the question like “Is distrobox as secure as QubesOS?”, which I replied with “No”.

Ahh, fair cop. Good point on Secureblue, but my threat model doesn’t take me there.

Eh, it’s fedora under the hood with SELinux enabled, and immutable, better than most security wise, I didn’t say much more.

Bazzite is the better distro because you install things in a distrobox. Muck around, break things in there, but your main distro stays safe, secure and stable.

Oh No ! Leopards Ate My Face.

Better off in the long run.

tried bazzite ? nvidia issues ?

So, still no official, sigh. Along with potentially rustdesk, I’ve found Sunshine/Moonlight useful but setup sucks.

Sigh. Way too much freeze in fight, flight or freeze…