This is pretty high on the to-do list. I plan on virtualization a bunch of it, but it would be pretty easy to have one desktop hosting each subnet of client PCs and one hosting the datacenter subnet. Having several hosts to physically network means less time spent verifying the virtual networks work as intended.
Also playing with different deployment tools is a goal too. Having 2-3 nearly-identical systems should be really useful for creating unified Windows images for deployment testing
The thought did cross my mind to run Linpack and see where I fall on the Top500 (or the Top500 of 2000 for example for a more fair comparison haha)
From the listing photos these actually have half-height expansion slots! So GPU options are practically nonexistant, but networking and storage is blown wide open for options compared to the miniPCs that are more prevalent now.
4th gen intel i5s, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSDs, so not terrible for a basic Windows desktop even today (except of course for the fact that no supported Windows desktop operating system will officially support these system come Q4 2025)
But don't get your hopes up, when I've bid on auctions like this before the lots have gone for closer to $80 per computer, so I was genuinely surprised I could win with such a low bid. Also every state has entirely different auction setups. When I've looked into it in the past, some just dump everything to a third party auction, some only do an in-person auction annually at a central auction house, and some have a snazzy dedicated auction site. Oh and because its the US, states do it differently from the federal government. So it might take some research and digging around to find the most convenient option for wherever you are (which could just be making a friend in an IT department somewhere that will let you dumpster dive)
Sounds like you'd love configuring network hardware then! You can get a peek into that in Linux with frr since it has a mode to configure your linux machine like you've just SSHed into a Catalyst switch, or just hop on ebay and buy a 20 year old switch for peanuts
Licensing is weird especially in schools. It may very well be practically free for them to license. Or for very small numbers of computers they might be able to come out ahead by only needing to hire tech staff that are competent with Windows compared to the cost of staff competent with Linux. Put another way, in my IT degree program every single person in my graduating class was very competent as a Windows admin, but only a handful of us were any good with Linux (with a couple actively avoiding Linux for being different)
Distrobox can be used to install other programs (including GUI apps)
I need to play around with that sometime. Is it a chroot or a privileged container or is it a sandboxed container with limited access? How's hardware excelleration in those?
so
git clone "$(wl-paste)"will clone whatever repo you copied to your clipboard. I use this one all the time
That's a lot of confidence in not accidentally grabbing a leading/trailing space and grabbing unformatted text. I never trust that I've copied clean text and almost exclusively Ctrl+Shift+V to paste without formatting
Running Windows for digital signage always struck me as an absolute waste of computing power. Just shove some low power Linux SBC into it and forget about it for about a decade or so
I dunno how often they normally change, week or so?
Quick bit of googling suggests printed billboards have a ~$1k startup cost to the advertiser then a flat rate monthly fee, so I'd hazard a guess its probably 3-6 months at a time to amortize the startup cost
Remember, Wilford Brimley (the "diabeetus guy" who was in those ads to lean on his fame as an actor) didn't start acting until he was in his 30s and didn't make it on screen until his 40s, and he wasn't a big actor until his 50s.
When I went back to college in 2020 about half of my graduating class was over the age of 30 and about a third was over the age of 50 (and honestly the older students landed by far the cushiest jobs by graduation, so they were able to skip about 10-15 years of career progression based on prior work experience in an entirely different industry/profession
I think you're not giving 4th gen enough credit. My wife's soon-to-be-upgraded desktop is built on a 4th gen i5 platform, and it generally does the job to a decent level. I was rocking a 4790k and GTX970 until 2022, and my work computer in 2022 was on an even older i5-2500 (more held back by the spinning hard drive than anything. Obviously not a great job, but I found something much better in 2022) my last ewaste desktop-turned-server was powered by an i5-6500 (which is a few percentage points better performance than the 4th gen equivalent) and I have a laptop I use for web browsing and media consumption that's got a 6700HQ in it.
I've already got a few people tentatively interested, and I honestly accepted the possibility of having to pay to recycle them later on. Should be a fun series of projects to be had with this pallet of not-quite-ewaste