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So, I bought a tower case machine at a local computer shop (not a consumer electronics store) for about $450. (That was with a 1TB hard drive rather than a 256 GB SSD. I'm not so sure that was a good trade.) The proprietor built it himself out of components, so I was pretty sure it was generic enough to run any x86-based operating system. My optimism did not go unrewarded; I installed Debian 10.2 and it worked just fine, but I'm still working on customizing it. See http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=146829 for my current set of problems.