I was an avid single player gamer a long long time ago (15+ years) and the recent Quake II remaster sparked the nostalgia in me and now I want start playing all my favorite classic games (StarCraft, Diablo II, Quake 2 and 3, Battlefield 2, etc.) again.

The problem is I mostly have old hardware. My old HP laptop running Arch just died recently and my old MSI laptop running Mint that I use as a media player connected to my tv is too slow to run games properly.

So I was thinking of buying one of those mini PCs or compact desktops that run around $200-$250 to dual boot Windows (don’t wanna waste the free license if it comes with it) and Linux and use it as a gaming machine. I’m so behind with pc specs nowadays so I wanted to ask the community for recommendations. I’ll be playing mostly the classic games above and their remastered versions so I don’t really need a top of the line machine, just something decent that isn’t too far behind and can still run some current games if I ever find anything new interesting.

Any suggestions please? Thanks!