The Dell I ordered to replace my old Linux box arrived, and after spending a few hours setting it up, it’s amazingly tiny, whisper-quiet, and works pretty well! It spooked me a bit when it suddenly started making sound, as I didn’t realize it has a speaker built right into the case.
It also doesn’t have room for the 8TB internal storage drive. Whoops! I probably misread the storage configuration information when I ordered it and it comes with two internal 2.5″ bays, and no 3.5″. It was super-easy to get at those bays though, so I took the old SSD and added it to the one the system came with.
I think I can still work with this, though. It’s so small that there’s plenty of space to put the storage drive in an external enclosure instead. Just from testing with the two external drives I have right now, I can get 150MB/s out of the USB3 ports (versus the 15-20 I was getting on the old system), so speed certainly won’t be a problem. It’ll just be another wall-wart to deal with…
And after using Ubuntu for probably close to 10 years, I’m giving Fedora a try instead. Just for something different, and I’d been seeing recommendations for it in a few places now. I’ll still mostly be using it via SSH, so there probably won’t be too much difference in practice.