All-in-one
Lenovo IdeaCentre, HP Pavilion, and Dell Vostro are some ideas.
Several USB ports are desired.
Two DisplayPort ports for additional monitors would be good.
Also headphone and microphone ports.
An SD card slot would be desired.
An optical drive would be desired, either DVD+/-RW or Blu-Ray.
Run Windows 10 Pro or Windows 11 Pro with VMware Workstation Player hosting Ubuntu Desktop. If not VMware Workstation, use VirtualBox.
Tower PC
Full-tower, anywhere from 13-19” tall, anywhere from 9-13” deep, and anywhere from 3-6” wide.
Intel Core i7 with vPro is a great idea for CPU. Another idea is an Ryzen.
At least 16GiB of RAM, perhaps 32GiB.
Feature an M.2 NVMe solid state drive of at least 128GiB.
Also feature a 3.5” hard disk drive. Perhaps an array of at least four 1TB disks. Prefer either RAID4, RAID5, or RAID10.
The PC should have at least six USB ports including two in the front and four in the rear, including USB 3.x. May also feature USB-C.
Feature an optical drive, either a DVD+/-RW or Blu-Ray drive.
Feature an Ethernet port.
A GPU such as NVIDIA GeForce or Quadro. Perhaps two of them.
For dedicated audio, use a DSP card or two, preferably VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) with vector floating-point processing. Desire at least one read/write bus, two write-only buses for audio output, and one read-only bus for audio input.
Feature at least two DisplayPort ports in rear.
Feature three Auxiliary Jack ports in rear. Also feature headphone and microphone ports in front.
Could have Windows 11 Pro as operating system, with Hyper-V hosting openSUSE Tumbleweed and either Fedora Workstation or Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), on either of which one would use Distrobox with Podman hosting Arch and Debian. But perhaps a better idea is Ubuntu Desktop with LXC/LXD hosting containers such as Arch Linux. This could be run alongside Oracle Linux UEK which would host Podman and DistroBox.
For Linux, have FAT32 for EFI system partition, ext4 for the boot directory, Btrfs for the root partition, and either ext4 (Ubuntu or Fedora) or XFS (Oracle Linux or openSUSE) for the /home directory. Arch would just have ext4 for the whole system.
Entry-level server
A Dell PowerEdge T30, T40, or T150 or Lenovo ThinkServer TS40 or ThinkSystem ST50 would be great.
Either a dual-core or quad-core Intel Celeron, i3, or N100 or a quad-core Xeon will do great. Another idea is an AMD Athlon or Ryzen.
At least one M.2 NVMe SSD inside, along with at least two, perhaps four hard drive bays.
Two Ethernet ports would be good.
An optical drive would be good.
One idea is to run Windows Server Essentials for SMB file server, print and document services, IIS web services, and Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services. Another idea is Fedora Server with Cockpit for Podman, QEMU+KVM, SMB and NFS file services, and a web server such as Apache, Hiawatha, or Cherokee with PHP and MySQL. In the latter case, one may run OwnCloud or NextCloud with Collabora Online.
Multiseat
Similar to entry-level server above. A few USB ports and anywhere from two to four DisplayPort ports would be desired in addition to the DVI port.
Windows Server 2016 or later Standard with MultiPoint Services role enabled. Install several Remote Desktop Services client access licenses.
Legacy-free desktop
An all-in-one nettop is one idea, a netbook is another. Both would have similar features.
ARM Cortex System-on-Chip.
NOR flash would be good for direct code execution.
SD card slot featured.
At least the netbook would have an HDMI port, but not sure about the nettop.
At least two USB ports for keyboard and mouse, along with headphone and microphone ports. Also feature a webcam.
Instant-on operating system installed, similar to Splashtop OS, but ideally based on Fuchsia OS rather than GNU/Linux. A browser, a text terminal, and a text editor would be included.
X Server installed. Connect to X clients which would be graphical applications running on remote devices that run Linux distributions such as Debian, Arch, and Fedora.
Also a sound server such as PulseAudio.
IT recommendations and ideas 