“This is the absolute basics of PC building: take a case, grab a processor, a standard PSU, two sticks of RAM and a few hard drives, and just slap it all together.”
A lovely Linux experience...
For this reviewer, it’s safe to say that Linux is a completely alien experience. Getting to grips with it certainly made for an interesting struggle. As a hardcore Windows fan, the concept of running the entire OS off a single bootable USB stick was mind-blowing. The versatility achieved by having the OS on a single drive to diagnose potential future hardware problems is nigh-on incredible, especially compared to an OS like Windows, where everything is tied down into authentication, personal accounts and Windows Updates.
That wasn’t the only thing that impressed, however. The level of customisation available upon installation was equally mesmerising. Did you want to use a virtual partition system ahead of time? Fine. Encrypt the drive’s OS and drive entirely? Okay. There are many other options equally possible on the portable desktop. Couple that with the ridiculously small install size, and it really is something worth trying, at least once, even by Linux’s harshest critics.
The thing is, Linux users are to operating systems what we enthusiasts are to hardware. They’re the tinkerers, the command-line delvers, those looking to tailor their desktops to exactly what they want to do. Whether that’s an office PC, a gaming rig, a NAS, a Plex Media Server, hell, even a mobile drone — all of it can be done through a variety of different distros ready to serve the user, most of which are free, and all of which are open-source.
And it’s that open-source heritage that makes the OS so much more in tune with the market than even Windows can manage. 4K scaling by default is a given, the user interface is intuitive and easy to use, and the best features from both Windows and MacOS are seamlessly integrated by default. That’s not to say it’s not without its problems, of course. Driver support is unbelievably patchy, and even running an AMD processor provides its own set of challenges. AMD GPU drivers are included in most distros by default, but Nvidia generally performs better once the driver is installed. Having to perform tweaks for any serious problem via the command line can become tiresome, and even having to learn how a new operating system works can be frustrating at times.
Naturally, as far as performance goes, with the Samsung PM961 operating alongside the Intel Core i5-6500, it was certainly quick to boot. Lightning-fast, in fact. File transfer speeds were well into the 3GB/s range on the primary drive, with Cinebench R15 providing an impressive score just shy of 620 points — what we’d expect from a core like this. Alas, that’s where our performance charts end. Benchmarking games in Linux is challenging, if not impossible. Games such as Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, do boast an integrated benchmark, but showed a 50% decrease in overall average frames per second compared to the same hardware running Windows. For the most part, what we can say is that Linux does support Steam, and more games are slowly threading their way into the OS. But gaming isn’t really what Linux is about.
Experience and performance aside, the build process itself was incredibly painless. This is the absolute basics of PC building: take a case, grab a processor, a standard PSU, two sticks of RAM and a few hard drives, and just slap it all together. There are no back plates to attach, no internal cooling to worry about, and no particular need for aggressive cable management. What you’re left with is an astonishingly quick build with relatively little fuss, that performs exceptionally well, regardless of what platform you happen to be on.