I mentioned that a hardware problem with my existing Trigkey mini PC is going to require a warranty replacement, so I ordered a used HP desktop in the bigger but still reasonable “small form factor” sizing. It arrived yesterday, and this post documents my initial setup process.
Hardware specs: The unit I received is the HP Elitedesk 805 G6. I had ordered the Prodesk G6, but the Elitedesk has some upgraded enterprise features and is essentially the same otherwise, so not complaining.
The Elitedesk runs AMD Ryzen PRO 4650G, with 32GB DDR4 RAM and a 512GB SATA SSD. The SSD has already close to 6 years operating time, which is old age, but it is working fine for now. I store my work product and casefiles in the cloud, so I’m not particularly concerned about a dead harddrive/data loss. I will however likely order a replacement SSD shortly; a mid replacement will cost $30 or $50.
I haven’t pushed the system yet, but my initial reaction is that this is more than powerful enough for my needs. I don’t see an obvious performance drop from the mini PC, which has a CPU that is much more performant on paper. The older AMD is fin, and I could have gotten away with 16GB RAM easily.
Initial Setup
- Windows.
- The Elitedesk came with Windows 11 Pro installed. I booted that, and logged in with my Microsoft account. This bound the Win11 product key to my account, so (hopefully?) if I ever want to run windows that key will be available to me.
- Dual boot?
- In the past, I have run a dual boot setup with Windows + Linux on the same machine. This allows the user to select the OS at boot, as the name implies. But the point of this project is to jettison Windows, so I decided to nuke the Windows OS and go straight Linux.
- For folks who want to dabble in Linux and see if it will work for them, dual boot would be the way to go. It’s a bit more complicated to install because you’ll need to either install a new SSD or create space on your existing drive, but it works great.
- Which Linux?
- There are many Linux flavors. For me, Debian (officially, Debian GNU/Linux) makes sense. It’s stable. It’s fast. It has excellent support. I don’t need bleeding edge software. YMMV.
- Linux Mint & Ubuntu are also popular options, and may be somewhat better for a user moving from Windows. Mint particularly holds itself out as ideal for that use case. Both are based on Debian, so under the hood they are all quite similar.
- Install Debian.
- I downloaded the Debian 12.10 “netinst” image, copied it to a Ventoy bootable USB stick, and booted the Elitedesk from the USB. If you want to test drive Debian, grab one of the “live” images from the download page.
- There are various other ways of doing this, but Ventoy is nice — it’s basically a wrapper that allows the user to boot a .iso file directly, without the need to burn the .iso to it’s own USB stick first. This means you can copy all sorts of .iso files to the Ventoy stick, and boot whichever one. Ie., Ventoy allows one to easily test drive Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint all from the same USB.
- Debian has a good graphical installer, just follow the prompts. I changed the default partition layout of my drive, but that was it.
- Debian supports all sorts of desktop environments (DEs), I’m using GNOME because it’s modern and visually appealing to me. New Linux users may want a more traditional DE, such as Plasma. If you’re not sure what you want, use the live images to test drive different DEs.
- I downloaded the Debian 12.10 “netinst” image, copied it to a Ventoy bootable USB stick, and booted the Elitedesk from the USB. If you want to test drive Debian, grab one of the “live” images from the download page.
- First boot.
- With Debian installed and booted, I adjusted system settings to taste (dark mode, power management/sleep, etc.).
- Got Firefox setup. I use different browsers for different things. Firefox for personal stuff like gmail; Chromium for my legal work. I like the segregation.
- Installed Flatpak. Flatpack is “the future of apps on Linux”; it avoids some of the problems that can crop up with direct install of software, like mismatched dependencies and so on.
- Installed a bunch of apps using Flatpack. Some of these I already know and use, others I found by browsing the app store and just want to try out at some point. Here are some:
- Edge – browser
- Chromium – browser
- Joplin – note taking and to-do
- Inkscape – vector graphics (I use this to make my sick logos)
- OBS Studio – live streaming and video (in case I want to try some podcasting)
- Obsidian – a markdown based knowledge base (I use this for casenotes)
- Tangent – note taking (have not tried this yet)
- Folio – notes and notebooks in markdown (have not tried)
- Xournal++ – hand notes, can annotate PDFs with a pen for example
- OCR Feeder – Optical Character Recognition