I think, for at least the first 30 years of my life, every Linux system I've ever built was with "hand-me-down" hardware. First hardware from my parents, then from various friends, then finally from my own expired projects.
When I was young (eleven!), this meant that we'd get a new computer, and now the very old computer it replaced could be repurposed as a "playground" for me to try various things — like installing Linux on — rather than throwing it out. (My first Linux install was Slackware 3.4 on a Pentium 166 machine. Not the best hardware for 1998!) Nary a manual in sight; of course my parents didn't keep those, especially for something like a monitor.
When I was a teenager, this meant getting hand-me-down hardware from friends who had taken the parts out of their own machines as they upgraded them. Never thought to ask for manuals, of course. (Also, sometimes I just found things like monitors laying on the side of the road — and my existing stuff was so old that this "junk" was an upgrade!)
And during my early adulthood, my "main rig" was almost always a Windows or (Hackintoshed) macOS machine. So it was still the "residue" of parts that left that rig as it got upgraded, that came together to form a weird little secondary Linux system. (So I could have kept the manuals at this point; but by then, the manuals weren't needed any more, as everything did become more PnP.)
It's only very recently that I bought a machine just to throw Linux on it. (Mostly because I wanted to replace my loud, power-sucking Frankenstein box, with one of those silent little NUC-like boxes you can find on Amazon that have an AMD APU in them, so I could just throw it into my entertainment center.) And funny enough... this thing didn't come with a manual, or even a (good) data-sheet! (Which is okay for HDMI these days, but meant that it was pretty hard to determine e.g. how many PCIe lanes the two M.2 slots on the board are collectively allocated.)
I think, for at least the first 30 years of my life, every Linux system I've ever built was with "hand-me-down" hardware. First hardware from my parents, then from various friends, then finally from my own expired projects.
When I was young (eleven!), this meant that we'd get a new computer, and now the very old computer it replaced could be repurposed as a "playground" for me to try various things — like installing Linux on — rather than throwing it out. (My first Linux install was Slackware 3.4 on a Pentium 166 machine. Not the best hardware for 1998!) Nary a manual in sight; of course my parents didn't keep those, especially for something like a monitor.
When I was a teenager, this meant getting hand-me-down hardware from friends who had taken the parts out of their own machines as they upgraded them. Never thought to ask for manuals, of course. (Also, sometimes I just found things like monitors laying on the side of the road — and my existing stuff was so old that this "junk" was an upgrade!)
And during my early adulthood, my "main rig" was almost always a Windows or (Hackintoshed) macOS machine. So it was still the "residue" of parts that left that rig as it got upgraded, that came together to form a weird little secondary Linux system. (So I could have kept the manuals at this point; but by then, the manuals weren't needed any more, as everything did become more PnP.)
It's only very recently that I bought a machine just to throw Linux on it. (Mostly because I wanted to replace my loud, power-sucking Frankenstein box, with one of those silent little NUC-like boxes you can find on Amazon that have an AMD APU in them, so I could just throw it into my entertainment center.) And funny enough... this thing didn't come with a manual, or even a (good) data-sheet! (Which is okay for HDMI these days, but meant that it was pretty hard to determine e.g. how many PCIe lanes the two M.2 slots on the board are collectively allocated.)