>any good recommendations for used pcs, my laptop is slowly starting to shit itself
Keep your shitbox and install gentoo on it. If you must, offload your compile workload to a rack.
I still daily drive my 2008 thinkpad with gentoo just fine, and I'm neither using pre compiled binaries, nor offloading my compile workload to a rack.
>>>44578
>im looking for desktops so this can be good
Thinkpad with dock, a dock for old thinkpads costs ~5$. If you have serious workloads, get a rack and use it to heat your basement. If you have nothing else to do with them, you could just let them mine monero for you to keep you warm in winter, because this is infinitely more efficient than just burning that energy for electric heating directly (without making money while doing it).
>>>44578
>what is the best year to look for when it comes to listings
Depends on what you want. If you want maximum freedom, 2008 (X200, T400, T500, W500).
If you want a good keyboard and slightly more performance, but only 99% freedom (IME can only be neutered and stripped down to a ~70K stub, not entirely removed), X220/T420.
If you want the same, but don't mind tinkering to swap an X220/T420 keyboard into your thinkpad while also filing off some edges and taping over contacts, modifying your EC firmware, etc..: T430/X230. If you don't mind a shitty chiclet keyboard, also T430/X230, but then you could also get a T440p or T480 if you want more performance.
Just don't forget to flash libreboot on it!
If you need a rack recommendation, go onto ebay and look for used POWER8/POWER9 racks (or even POWER7), they are RIDICULOUSLY cheap if you look for them at the right time, and a lot of them can take 1024GiB of RAM, or even come with it included. It'll cost you about 200-500$, at most 800 with 1024GiB of RAM included.
They are only this cheap because GAYMERS can't use them, and because their RAM DIMMs have a proprietary form factor called CDIMM that doesn't fit regular x86_64 boards, so you can sleep well at night knowing that RAM Altman can't do anything with your RAM even if he wanted to.
It's PPC64, so you'll have to use BSD or compile everything from source (I recommend a source-based GNU/Linux distribution like gentoo for this), but everything should work perfectly fine, unless you're trying to run proprietary software that isn't enterprise software specifically compiled for PPC racks.
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