I think that i will need to get new desktop hardware, so i'm trying to figure out what to do.
When i got my last hardware, one challenge was UEFI booting, iirc. After dealing with it, i sort of lost track of what was happening in that arena. However, i don't want to get involved with that again.
I was dragged, "kicking and screaming" to UEFI booting. But, now that I'm here, it's "sort of" grown on me.
What helped me, a lot, is a package called Refind. It's available on Debian, through normal Apt-Get, though it's good to, carefully read the Documentation before Installing.
I'm sort of thinking about getting a Dell Inspiron but maybe i should buy from a linux vendor instead, such as 76? Presumably at least in that case at least i wouldn't have to worry about the bios.
I certainly would want to get something which supported 2 or 3 internal disks, but i would also like to get something that could be booted from an external usb drive. Does that make sense?
Yes it does. As I said, I had a lot of trouble with UEFI at the beginning and, so had a workaround of setting it up to (by default) boot from an external USB Stick, but boot Linux Partitions on the main Hard Drive.
Would it make sense to look for something where all usb ports are usb 3.0? I've never used usb 3.0 at home, so i'm kind of unclued.
In a way, i'd like to have something with 2 ethernet ports on the motherboard, although i've found that usb-to-ethernet is adequate for my purposes.
And i think i'd like to stick with debian, but i would consider any free OS. (So if i bought a Dell, i would add a disk drive or two, and boot off the debian disk, probably removing the windows disk.)
I have a mix on my HP Pavilion Desktop, with the two I boot most being Debian Bullseye and Mint 20.
I'd appreciate any pointers or recommendations.
And i forgot to add that i would like to be able to easily run qemu or other virtual machines. How would that affect the choice of processor, amount of memory, and disks?
That's one reason I am running Bullseye: I set up qemu-kvm on Mint 20, put a guest in, and promptly ran low on space. So I wanted to export it to Debian, but found that the version of qemu was higher than the one on Buster (which wouldn't allow the Import). So I'm on Bullseye. Research the differences between the versions of qemu and you might want Bullseye also.
Happy to help.
Kenneth Parker