I aquired a PC quite late. My first tower PC, which is the same one I use today, is from 2022. Before then, I was on an old Acer Swift 5 laptop with 4GBs of RAM. It wasn't great, but computers is still a rather new hobby for me. When I started Gymnasium in 2020, at the age of 16, I got a Thinkpad X1 Yoga Carbon Gen 4 from the school for schoolwork. I knew my way around Windows thanks to an old Windows 8 Dell AIO PC we had at home, and I quickly got the hang of Windows 10, and eventually 11 as well. The Thinkpad served me alright during school, but I always knew that I wanted to put Linux on it. Windows just felt way to limiting, and I had a bit of Linux experience thanks to the Aspire, which ran Linux Mint. I used several VMs on the Thinkpad to still my need for some customizability, but the 8GBs of RAM made it a suboptimal experience. So in the second year of Gymnasium I finally decided to build a tower PC. For about 7000 SEK ($700) I bougt an MSI B550 Motherboard, Ryzen 5 5600G CPU, a 750W PSU, 16GB of RAM, an old GTX 1060 from a friend, and some other parts to make it a complete PC. I finally had something that ran Linux, and that I knew was truly mine.
At graduation from Gymnasium in 2023 I had the option to buy the Thinkpad for 2800 SEK (~$280), which honestly was a great deal. I bought it, flashed EndeavourOS to a flashdrive, pulled a "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nvme0n1 status=progress" and finally watched that Windows installation that had plagued me for so long get shredded. That laptop has since served me very well. The keyboard is fantastic, the 1440p display is crisp, and it is overall a very sexy laptop. The caveats are the soldered 8GB of RAM and the 8th gen i5 CPU. Sometime when I actually earn money I am going to get a better Thinkpad. Something with upgradeable RAM, dedicated GPU, and at least a 1440p display. Once you go HiDPI it is impossible to go back. Preferably an AMD CPU as well, since they still appear to beat Intel in power efficiency.
The tower is also due an upgrade. The 1060 has done its job by now, and the 6GB of VRAM is becoming more and more apparent. Especially for AI workloads. I run ollama for LLM inferencing, and it is honestly very convenient to be able to ask questions and generate text on demand. Obviously it has a lot of shortcomings, but it is still a nice-to-have. The RTX 3090s are starting to become reasonably cheap, and the 24GB of VRAM should be a noticable upgrade. The CPU is also due an upgrade. I want to do more local compilation, but right now the linux kernel takes over an hour to compile, and I do not have that patience.
Finally, sometime in the future I want to setup a complete homelab to host my own tilde server, website, file server, *arr stack, movie collection, Jellyfin/Plex/emby/whatever server and a lot more. But that will take both time, space and money, all of which is in somewhat short supply now. It is always good to have something to look forward to as well I guess.