My son is turning 9 and has been using his computer more and more. he has my old System76 wild dog from 2010, which is a great computer, but is way past the end of its life. He mostly plays minecraft and browser games, though he is doing more artistic stuff in gimp and even a bit of cad for our 3d printer or in blockbench.
We’re looking at a System76 Meerkat for him. For most things I think it would be a huge upgrade, but it is NOT a gaming computer. That being said, his requirements are slim. He mostly plays Switch or on the tablet for “gaming” and I think if it ever came down to it, we could explore things like external GPU’s. He’s not even on steam yet.
The Meerkat can use Intel UHD graphics, or Iris Xe graphics depending on the CPU. I would like some subjective feedback on if those are workable for a kid’s computer, the specs are here (we’d probably go 12th gen CPU): https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat#specs
/u/qwesx@kbin.social I can’t reply to comments from kbin.social, so here is the reply
I couldn’t reply yesterday for some reason, but we are gonna do a mini prebuilt for 3 reasons, 1) the space caters to it more, he’s at a small area of my desk in my home office. 2) He’s not interested in building a computer yet. We just rebuilt the minecraft server and he was totally disinterested, and it’s desktop parts in a server chassis, he just wants to use it. I think that’ll change when he’s a little older, but for now this is a better fit. 3) Warranty; I have used system76 machines for years for work and the warranty is worth it for a really reliable machine.
We will make his own computer for sure one day…I don’t know how to explain this, but hopefully this shows how much I get it, this is me custom designing my own acrylic lan party case in 2001: https://www.surfrock66.com/compucube-case-design/ and here’s it’s successor in 2004: https://www.surfrock66.com/the-supercomputer-mod/ I’ve been doing super-customs for a LOOOOONG time, and one day he will for sure enter the world lol.