My relatives have an old (Haswell) PC which has been happily running Mint Cinnamon 19.3. Unfortunately, it looks like the motherboard has just failed, as it's no longer POSTing (no beeps, just power-cycling - the PSU is fine) - doh.
I'm looking at getting a new CPU, motherboard, memory, and a larger SSD, and doing a fresh install of Mint 20.1 on it. I'm aware that Mint 20.1 Cinnamon comes with the 5.4 and 5.8 kernels, and that some of the hardware options available may be "too new" for those kernels, so I thought I'd run through the options I have available, and see if I'm likely to run into any issues...
Option 1: Intel
In terms of local availability, the only parts which seem to be readily available are Comet Lake CPUs and B560 motherboards (there is also a smaller selection of B460 motherboards) - earlier and later CPUs seem to be out of stock. With this in mind, I'd likely be looking at a Core i3-10100 (or similar) with a B560 motherboard. Unfortunately, from what I've seen, the UHD 630 GPU on the CPU die would require the 5.10 kernel, which means installing the Ubuntu OEM kernel (via the
linux-image-oem-20.04b
package). Whilst this in itself isn't an issue, I couldn't see if I'd likely have an issue with getting the Live "CD" to work so I could install the OS (I'm guessing not, but if I don't ask, I'm sure it will go wrong ). I suppose one way around this would be to get a cheap nVidia GT710 graphics card to bypass the integrated GPU issue..?Option 2: AMD
Whilst my natural inclination would have been a Ryzen 3, they all appear to be out of stock, and the cheapest available option is a Ryzen 5 3600 and B550 motherboard. Whilst this does have the advantage of working with the 5.4/5.8 kernel (as far as I can see), it is "somewhat over-specified" (ahem) for the web browsing, e-mail, and letter-writing they'd use it for, and would require a graphics card as the CPU doesn't have a GPU built into it. It's also more expensive than the Intel option by about a third.
Do the above summaries look accurate? Or are there any other issues which are likely to crop up that I should be aware of?
Thanks
P.S. PC Part Picker lists representative of what I was considering:
Intel: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/f2q2Dc
AMD: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/vBDs7X