I’ve recently picked up a secondhand Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny PC which ultimately I plan to use as a home server for a variety of functions (media server being the main one) but I don’t need to use it as a main desktop.
It currently has Windows 10 installed. It has a decent sized SSD but no optical drive. I want to install a suitable Linux distro on it. What’s a good Linux distro for my needs? And what’s the best way of doing a scorched earth on the Windows install and replacing it with said distro?
I’m not entirely a Linux noob - I used to work on Xenix and later Red Hat Linux, but that was 30 and 20 years ago respectively!
They are all pretty good. I usually go with Ubuntu server + Docker Compose and turn on live kernel patches. If it’s not getting exposed to the internet, you probably don’t care about live kernel patching. What ever server distro you choose, Docker Compose makes it all easy. If you are used to Red Hat, I think RHEL has a few solid derivatives that you’ll be easily familiar with.
You can make a live thumb drive that will walk you through. The installers for server look the same as they did 20+ years ago.