I just upgraded a Linux box I build in 2018. It had a Ryzen 5 1600 and 16gb DDR4. Previously I’d replaced the video card with a Radeon 580. But with that config it sucked at video games, pretty much unplayable. Replaced the CPU with a Ryzen 9 5900 and slightly faster 32GB DDR4 and now all of a sudden it plays older games great. Probably the most challenging game I’ve tried is Doom from 2016 or whenever which isn’t much to brag about but the CPU upgrade made a huge difference. The video card and CPU was about $450. Definitely worth the money. It feels like a totally different computer.

As a side note, I’m generally not a big fan of generative AI but it was helpful in deciding the upgrades. In particular it pointed out that to upgrade the CPU I needed to update my motherboard BIOS. Double check everything for sure but it provided solid suggestions.

That’s what I use too.

I set it up a while ago and don’t have a good resource for setting it up now. Once I got it set up it has worked well. But like I said it seems fragile. When I upgraded fedora a couple of years ago it broke. I think it might have been the wayland transition. I switched from Nvidia to AMD. But I’m not sure that’s necessary. My wife and I have two workstations on one computer. It works well until it breaks (if you want to live with end of life software it may not break). For whatever reason multiseat doesn’t seem to be a mainstream feature. But I like it and have been using it for many years.

https://wiki.debian.org/Multi_Seat_Debian_HOWTO

Loginctl is the tool you use to assign hardware to different seats. Also I’m not sure every login manager supports it. I used GDM.

The open source community feels like the ultimate right to repair environment. You’re right, it feels very empowering and fulfilling. Totally opposite of the frustration of dealing with often intentionally unrepairable products.