Ideal choice for your Asrock J3355M is a reliable gaming PC build.
Ideal choice for your Asrock J3355M is a reliable gaming PC build.
I understand your perspective. While I don’t often rely on screens above 1080p, I’m not convinced about the benefits of 4K yet. My games still work well at 1080p—or sometimes even 720p in tougher titles or on the Switch. For movies, they might look better in 4K, but I still enjoy them with DVDs or standard Blu-ray copies, and I don’t have to worry about the right hardware for encoding or decoding. (My TV is only 1080p/43” anyway, and honestly I’m worried about it failing soon.) I actually own a 4K display in my basement, which I mostly use for my homelab projects. It’s frustrating because I always have to adjust scaling to make things readable. I’d rather have a lower-resolution monitor, but it was free.
On a work screen, it's large and 4K, but for YouTube it's not essential. In fact, the channels where you see people—like Steve at GN or Linus—always use 4K. However, the content doesn't improve with me seeing them in higher resolution. Smaller YouTube channels that actually display their work usually use HD, likely due to budget constraints.
It seems 4K could be useful for specific tasks, but for my current work the monitors I own (two 1680x1050 screens) are more than sufficient. The IT team might be able to retrieve my old monitors if needed.
Choose a specific distribution less of a concern than the desktop environment. For low-end setups, Mint with XFCE is often my go-to recommendation. While Mint isn't ideal for gaming, its XFCE version works well on older machines. I favor Fedora with XFCE, though its XFCE variant is quite poor.