About the Gigabyte G41M-ES2L mobo, I like the fact it’s an onboard intel
GPU. I see that Nvidia cards becomes legacy quite fast, and finally even
nouveau will soon stop supporting them. Maybe I’m a bit pessimistic but as
I have a good socket 775 mobo without an onboard GPU, I’m dependent on
Nvidia graphics cards and nouveau. When I choose my mobo, I didn’t realize
Nvidia would be trouble since at the time (2007) I used Ubuntu. Ubuntu makes
you rather blind to nonfree firmware :-(
I hope that Intel GPU will be supported for a long time by Linux. On this
mobo it’s GMA X4500, I think, no glitches?
After years of using Realteck ethernet onboard and PCI cards, I’ve just
realised they require nonfree firmware in order to really work. In my Debian
libre, I get warnings that my card may not be working while it does in fact
work, but perhaps only at 100Gb/s, which is fine by me.
I don’t need a super CPU, actually. An E5800 would suit me fine, and all
those Intel CPU can be overclocked, contrary to the Haswells etc. I could
also overclock our E2160 and Celeron 420 but old E5800 or E8400 CPUs are
dirt-cheap these days.
Seeing how Intel making new sockets and CPUs, and adding nonfree firmware to
its CPUs without which the CPU will not work (beginning with Skylake? or even
before?), making most of them non overclockable, I think that socket 775
mobos may be the best choice.
ARM is another choice as well, but less easy to use (single boards don’t
make adding harddisks very easy, for instance).
