with that much of dough now (inflation adjusted), I just hope that common server focused Linux distros are supported out of the box. my experience with dell workstation (refurbed one though), was pretty ok ish. not that buttery smooth but was ok.
PCs used to be pretty costly. The long-time editor in chief of PC Magazine coined "Machrone's Law" that the PC you wanted always cost $5,000--and that held pretty well into at least the late 90s.
Supported Linux on one or two PC models is a pretty longstanding sideline of Dell's. They've had some version of Ubuntu on a laptop for a long time.
It's pretty astounding what you get for $2k 2023 dollars now, which is roughly $1k in 1998 dollars.
Plus that $2k 2023 machine will be good enough for probably 5 years even for a pretty serious professional. Versus a $3k 1998 machine that even for a young hobbyist was basically decrepit in under 3 years.
So your modern day computing run rate is like $400 2023 dollars per year, versus late 90s being easily the equivalent of $2k 2023 dollars per year.
Once GUIs became the norm, that shiny new PC you bought/built was basically not fast enough on Day 1. Whereas I still use my 2015 iMac and MacBook and they're really not even that bad for photo and video editing. I did buy an M1 Pro MacBook for multimedia but I'll be the first to admit it was sort of a luxury purchase. (And partly for reasons that may not really play out.)
My first dual floppy PC clone (who could afford a hard disk or genuine IBM?) in 1982 was somewhere in the low 4 digits all-in which was probably close to 10% of my gross salary as an engineer at the time.
But, yeah, you can get a very well equipped Mac for about $3K these days. (Which is obviously not the economy PC option.) Even if you were starting from scratch you'd probably have to really work to get it up to $5K with external monitor, external hard drives, peripherals, printer, etc.
