I want to build a tiny little linux computer, where should i start?

If all you're doing is simple media browsing, Nouveau covers AMD and NVidia.

Nouveau is the open source, reverse-engineered, and poorly performing driver for Nvidia cards. Radeon is the open source, well performing driver for AMD cards. They aren't the same.

And here are some benchmarks made in March (not the most extensive benchmarks ever made, mind you): http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzODQ

And I actually believe that having to manually install a driver in linux from a third party website is out of the ordinary and I should not need to do it. This isn't Windows, everything else works out of the box or with a package from the official repos, why should I install a third party driver for my GPU to work?

As for the whole dicking around to install Catalyst, there are some distro that make that extremely easy: https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Catalyst. You can also do that from a GUI, btw.

+1 for Fedora 22. The first distro that "just worked" for me without any desktop stuttering or screen tearing etc.

might be going back to ubuntu studio unless I install fedora 22 studio edition. Need Lightworks and Ardour and the RTM kernel is real nice

Another guy mentioned Mesa drivers as well. This has already been covered, I'm not changing my previous posts.

That would be damn nice, but as stated many times before, I must have a driver that supports 3D in virtual machines. If (defalt driver) supports games in 4k at eye-popping draw distance in the native machine, great. It still means nothing if it will not passthrough cleanly into my virtual machines.

I've been through bohdi, manjaro, fedora, cent, Magia, Arch etc (you get the idea.) I feel most at ease with an lmde/puppy combo. Hat styles.

So, to the heart of the matter:
I don't owe you a justification for my experience and the resulting opinion. You can crow aaaaall day long about why you like AMD and default drivers, it's certainly your right. It's not your right to expect me to spend time defending my experiences to you. The entire tone of your writings should be

1.) "Oh hey man that's a bummer. This setup works great for me, maybe try it sometime?"
Instead it comes off as
2.) "I'm gonna nitpick every little thing you say like the worst kind of list-keeping spouse."

The first is great, everyone posting their own experience is a great way to share knowledge and build new methods. The second is just obnoxious.You keep to your experience, i'll keep to mine.

You're right, the implementations of ARM designs are not open source in many instances, but they are in others. ARM designs themselves are open source though, and very well documented.

In the end, whether or not the hardware manufacturers blow the fuses on their SoC's or apply raisin to obfuscate parts, is not as important as the fact that manufacturers like Samsung, AMD, Freescale, etc... drive the innovations in hardware and software these days.

The remarkable thing is that they've set a new standard, and in reaction, x86 is not moving towards more performance, in fact, with the major software platforms, someone with a core duo (first gen) or AMD X2, will be productive enough to make money and compete in the market, there is no real need for anything faster, because the technology that would necessitate faster hardware is not released to the public. X86 is rather moving towards lower power and lower thermals, to compete with RISC SoC designs, because miniaturization is always more important than performance increase. With miniaturization comes modularity and flexibility, and the world has become so complex nowadays that it's just not possible for one coglomerate of monopolists to cover the whole technological market, unless it's a niche market. That's why open source has become more important than closed source. That's why Intel doesn't run Android 5.1.1, and Intel has no Android 5.1, or even a 5.0 image available for anything but select Z-chipsets that are only found in phones and some tablets, and those images are courtesy of Rockchip in China, and did not come cheap for Intel... all of this while Android 5 is already the past, because the Google Devcon this year is behind us, so Android M is what it's all about now... and that's just one example, there are many more, like the obvious backlog of Intel in keeping up with the Linux kernel, that is pushed forward aggressively by the ARM-based developers.

The entire added value these days lies not in performance, but in miniaturization and lower power. The Wintel Alliance knows this. That's why they sell the Surface 3 (non-Pro) 10inch lightweight (and much more practical, at least in the 4GB RAM version, the 2GB version is pretty useless) for just under 800 USD including the keyboard and pen. A better device from Lenovo, that also includes a 500 GB harddrive, costs only half of that, but it weighs 300 grams more and is 3 mm thicker, even though it has a longer battery life and a stronger Intel processor... less is more these days. Windows 8 already has WIMBOOT, Windows X will use NTFS compression on system files to reduce the system image to about 15-16 GB of storage space without full WIMBOOT. A WIMBOOT image comes in at about 4 GB for a very minimal arrangement, which is still about twice as much as a non-compressed full KDE 5 or Gnome 3.16 Linux Install, or a full blown Android 5.1.1 or M install. Intel has shown preparedness to sacrifice huge amounts of system performance (e.g. extreme throttling to a point where the CPU's underperform greatly, even compared to pretty cheap ARM SoC's), Microsoft has only removed Windows-functionality since Windows Vista/7 for the same reason, there is no technical advancement (NTFS compression is hardly new, even when it's applied to system files...) at all, all they do is cut user functionality, and the only thing they add is spyware functionality, which is cloud-based and runs on their servers, not on the local device, much like Google Now and Siri.

And that's where your wishes will come true to have ARM on the desktop: to be perfectly honest, I wish I could use Android on the desktop sometimes, because it is thousandfold more efficient than commercial desktop platforms. For instance, I have a Cherry Trail based convertible, and it was really hard to get Linux to work on that thing, and every time the kernel is updated, it takes me a lot of time to tweak the new kernel to work on that device. The experience of Gnome 3.16 is great, but to be honest, for instance using LibreOffice or Darktable with touch screens is not the best experience ever, it's about on par with MS-Office 365 or Lightroom CC, so it feels kinda old. Using Google Docs and Snapseed on an Android touch screen device on the contrary is real progress in terms of efficiency.

Everything evolves. Some time ago, it would be inconceivable to do commercial grade photo editing on anything else but a powerful desktop computer. Nowadays, there are cameras that allow for live viewing the exact end result while shooting, and print is not the primary destination of the imagery, but rather mobile device screens are, so shooting jpeg is more than adequate enough. With that come really efficient software solutions like Snapseed, which are also free to use. The same thing goes for office software. These days, the documents are shorter and are sent back and forth at a much higher rate, and online cooperation on documents and version tracking have become the main tools of office productivity. All of the bloatware functionality of heavy office suites has become less necessary, because these applications are made for monk-like heavy editing, which is great, and I prefer it personally, but the world doesn't require that kind of dedication any more these days, now everything has to show constant motion, move very fast, touch a lot of people at the same time. Google docs is very good for that, so is Inbox. The big benefit these newer softwares have, is that they are tiny and run very efficiently, and are based upon open source code and projects, even though they always kept open source or open source isn't always credited or even respected... but they inherit the benefits of their open source roots... for instance object linking and embedding, something that has never ever worked as it should on commercial x86 platforms (and those that have written applications that tie in with MS-Office in the past know exactly how problematic this has always been), is super smooth on Google's commercial Android platform, because it's based on open source, where this just works, and requires little overhead. Another thing that really matters, is that C++ for instance, was never made to be lean and mean, it doesn't deliver the same small footprint as C, it's bulky to use, not suitable for the mobile world, even if the .net tools are made available for free now, and some of it is open sourced, the problem of code efficiency remains.

In conclusion, having an ARM-based desktop device isn't a bad idea, because a lot of modern more efficient software runs better on ARM, and is efficient enough to give an experience that is better than old style commercial software on x86 devices that are made to compete with ARM. So I definitely share your wish for a desktop ARM device.

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I would go with a miniITX system with an onboard CPU (AMD A4-5000, Intel J1900 or one of the new N3XXX Intels). There are even some cases that offer VESA mounts for mini-ITX. Small SSD for boot and 100% more snappyness and a HDD for the videos and other media.

Mainboard/CPU: ~80$
RAM: ~50$
SSD: 50$ (100 Gig)
HDD: 50$ (1TB)
Case: ~40$
PSU: 30$ if not already included into the Case

Will use <20 Watts of power if the PSU is sufficiently efficient.

Distrowise I would go with whatever you like (try a bunch in a VM). I do not like Elementary OS that much (currently using it but cannot get the hang of the dock).

When you say 3D for VMs do you mean full PCIe pass-through? NVIDIA broke that about a year ago. Or do you mean 3D acceleration for VirtualBox or VMware because that does work alright?

I still have yet to see an ARM desktop computer that's not a raspberry pi-like device or an Acorn Archimedes. It's true that we're seeing a bigger drive for miniaturization and portable devices lately. Current ARM chips fill that area really well, and you could get standard office and browser packages running smoothly. However, i do a lot of 3D rendering/visualisation in Blender, and ARM is out of the question for a workstation platform at the moment. I'd love to see ARM implementations on par with Intel or AMD's desktop x86 offerings, but i just don't see it entering that market anytime soon.

Also, it's not really in the spirit of open-source when manufacturers don't contribute back their innovations. Improvements to the CPU and GPU architecture would be much faster if these companies cooperated instead.

Why not just get one of the PCs that run off an hdmi port?