Price of hardware has become insane, and I wish I'd have built a new system before it got this bad. Now I'm in this state where I fear if I buy now I'll overpay, or if I wait it could possbily go even higher in cost. Which is a wild situation to be in.
I'm currently running Ubuntu 18.04 which is waaay out of date obviously.
But my reason for sticking with this sytem is I have so much bespoke configurations and installations that won't necessarily be there if I upgrade.
And my hardware is also woefully antiquated, but it still does what I need.
Recently I performed an update that I had put off for months and months, and ended up unable to login to my Ubuntu with Nvidia drivers.
I spent 4 days reinstalling drivers etc. with no luck.
But if I boot with Noveau(open source Nvidia) I can get in.
The main thing I don't want to lose is VMware Workstation because the majority of my VM's are for that hypervisor.
I also have a Pop_OS computer, and disovered that there were no VMware Kernel modules for it. But I don't recall if that's specific to it being Pop_OS, or if that's just newer Linux kernels in general.
There was a big shakeup and VMware got bought out by Broadcomm so I have to research my options moving foward.
I may have missed the boat on hardware prices, but I will have to go for a new PC some time anyway.
I don't do too much tweaking on my system so I can just use standard installs. I don't even have a use for VMs. There's stuff I want to play with, but I lack the time.
I'm not sure if you're aware of the whole AI/Data-Center bubble that's happening. THey're building them everywhere, and it's so bad that the companies that manufacture chips for RAM aren't even really worried about supplying retail demand anymore.
But what's even worse is that companies like Open-AI have future-orders places where money hasn't even been exchanged, but rather it's a "promise to pay" for future massive orders.
Lots of screwy things happening right now with the tech companies, the US govt, and the fabs that manufacture this stuff.
This happened during Covid too, and particularly with the GPU's for mining crypto-currency etc.
In my case, I rely on VM's to test out distros/operating systems for recording my videos, but also I maintain a VM that hosts all my servers and containers.
It does seem to be a boom time for the hardware makers and I wonder if it can last. I may just have to bite the bullet and buy what I can afford.