Building a Linux Gaming PC in 2026
| 4 min read
Building a house, or renovating one really, is not enough. I'm building a gaming PC as well. I decided on the luxurious budget of $10000 MXN (Or about €500 EUR) and started buying things.
I bought another old ProDesk computer from Amazon. This one a G6 Model. I now have a G2, a G4 and a G6 series of these things. I think they're pretty cool. I spent just over $7400 on it. The PC is specced with a 256GB NVMe, i5-10500 CPU and 16GB ram in a single stick. Old, but kinda neat.
That stupid Gemini AI tried to convince me that every one of these computers comes with a 550W power supply. I told it no, and quoted the specifications and manuals. But it insisted. And so I kinda risked it. If it has one, fine. If not, I'll upgrade it and buy parts as needed. Of-course it came with a 180W power supply.
Ignoring the hardware limitations for now, I quickly installed Linux Mint before the bad aftertaste of Windows 11 could catch up with me, but now I have to live with the disappointment that is Linux Mint.
Immediately after installing I explored the OS a little. Seemed alright. Simple, neat. The start menu works weird, but whatever. It's a new (to me) OS and I just have to adapt. I have been looking forward to using Linux Mint for over 2 years. I've always told myself, if I ever get a PC again I'll stick Linux Mint on it... What a bad idea that was.
After my initial exploration I tried to install Steam. It didn't work. Some dumb error that made no sense to me. Missing whatevers and blabla about proprietary software. But no clear problem and definitely no way to fix it. Just an OK button. And who cares! Let me install a game dammit!! I tried a few more times, but it wasn't to be.
Then I tried to do updates. That usually solves all kinds of quirks. But even that had issues. I didn't care enough to try and fix it there and then, and I don't really remember what I did. But after a restart I managed to eventually install Steam and was able to log in to my account - It seems like a LOT of my games are Linux compatible. I am hopeful for a Windows free future! The updates never went through for some reason. Fine, no updates...
I then tried to install Jellyfin client, and that wouldn't work either. Until I downloaded the .deb from github. Because why would the one in package manager work, it's only a flatpak... Supposedly the end-all-be-all of easy to use softwares on linux. So yeah, that took entirely too long to deal with.
This is a new, never used installation, mind you. So weird, so far I don't like Mint at all.
I've decided I don't like Flatpak either. The install sizes are huge! Just let me install the one package and it's dependencies without wasting gigabytes of my storage! Like it should be...
Anyway, with the computer confirmed working. I started looking for the gaming PC bits. Because a HD630 on-board graphics processor isn't going to cut it. Eventually I found an affordable Nvidia 1660 Super, an extra 500GB NVMe SSD and that 550W Power Supply! Because all these things have chips in them and proprietary written on them I had to spend just over $8100 on all of that. This put my spendings at around $15500 MXN. Or just north of €780 EUR.
I'm not sure what to do with Linux Mint. My gut tells me to get rid of it. My last foray into Ubuntu was much better. But that's over 20 years ago. My first impression of Mint is really 'meh'. But I fear that whatever else I put on there will be kind of a downer too.
While I decide, I wait for parts!