I ordered a Thelio Mira from System 76. It may take up to 10 days before they have it built and shipped. In the meantime, I need to get my desk area ready for the computer before it arrives. The first step was getting rid of that incomplete desktop computer.
The computer will sit on a night stand beside my desk alongside my flatbed scanner on the vacant space previously occupied by the incomplete computer. I had started on the monster case back when I was still on Win 7. I had planned on using six monitors and had them already mounted on a "bridge" in front of an inconveniently located window on the west wall of my bedroom.
However, since Linux has easily accessible multiple workspaces (of which I use more than one daily), three monitors will be plenty. When I took this picture, I had already removed one of the superfluous monitors.
The monitor stand was designed to allow easily removing monitors by lifting a pin on a monitor's mount, tip the bottom forward, then simply lift it off. However, I had spaced the monitors so close together, it was impossible to tilt the bottom ones up enough to remove them so I had to remove the four screws on the VESA mount behind the monitors. That took an hour. The end ones were fairly easy to get to; they only took 15 minutes each to remove. The center one's screws, however, were harder to get to and it took 30 minutes of fiddling and fooling around to get those pesky, little screws removed.
Even though the stand is a good sturdy one, I had taped the side edges of them together so they wouldn't gap apart. I Used gaffer's tape since it's cloth backed, making it stronger than "duct" tape, and it is not supposed to leave residue behind when removed like "duct" tape will. Apparently, that is true only for short term use and these monitors had been up for a few years.
Granted, "duct" tape would have been weaker and would have left far more of a mess behind than the Gaffer's tape did but it still was a bit annoying. I haven't bothered to remove the residue since the three monitors are going into storage. Also, though something like Goof Off or naphtha based lighter fluid will remove the residue, it could also damage the plastic shell of the monitor so I'm just not going to worry about it until I need to, if ever (I did clean off the residue on the power cables I had bundled with gaffer's tape). I now have four spare monitors (I bought a spare monitor in case one died and ASUS had discontinued them, which they now have). I also saved four of the stands for them.
I'll need to figure out a Plan B, maybe a strip of thin plastic stuck over the unused outlets with some double sided carpet tape. I'll have to think on that a bit.