So my previous rant was about a 13-year-old PC with a ton of dust... It is a 2004 PowerMac G5 1.8GHz, and I recently installed a flavor of debian on it called Lubuntu, so now I actually use it. It currently has 750mb of ram but I found a max upgrade (4x1gb) on eBay and that's in the mail.

Once that comes in I'll have an ok-ish machine but I'll have nothing to use it for.

So what can I use it for? I open to suggestions.

NAS?

@ScribeOfGoD Ive thought about that actually. Id probably have to set up a VPN and get some compatible SSDs

@runfrodorun Nice. Do you have ssds installed in yours?

@runfrodorun Oh ok I'll do some more resesrch

In my experience (I was in the same situation before) there are very few proper use cases for such a machine, if any.
I was using a 10 year old laptop as server for my cloud (owncloud) for a couple of months - but migrated to a raspberry pi pretty soon.
The problem with these old computers is, that they have an enormous power consumption when idling compared to modern machines (*especially* something like a rasPi) while not offering significantly more power than available single-chip computers (which are probably even as cheap or cheaper than the RAM you ordered).

@runfrodorun

I would think the 1.2ghz quad-core 64 bit ARM processor on a Raspberry Pi 3 would give you much more horse power, not to mention it has double the ram.

The processor is made by broadcom and the architecture is licensed from Acorn Risk Machines no Intel in sight.

You could also go for a Banana pi, which I believe has an allwinner cpu again ARM architecture.

There are many alternatives to Intel on the market without resorting to old hardware.

@runfrodorun

For someone with issues against Intel you sure do mention them a lot in this comparison.

I have worked with power pc processors professionally and they just can't compete with the ARM processors available.

For a NAS or other small appliance a Raspberry pi or other SOC based board is far more suitable than a great huge power mac.

I never claimed anything about graphics performance.

As for driver support, I've never had any issues on the pi. The support is equal with my Intel and AMD based machines running Linux.

As for allwinner their hardware is shit but it does not have Intel written on it which seems more important to you than actual capabilities.

@runfrodorun I'm not sure where you got the idea of running a pi as a PC replacement. I was talking about using them as single purpose appliances where you don't need massive amounts of horse power and being more power conscious is desirable.

I wouldn't call a G5 a viable alternative to Intel not when there are plenty of modern non Intel chips floating around whether they are x86 based or ARM based.