i wanted to keep costs down so i used whatever spare hardware i had on hand. i am using some dusty, intel haswell processor on an ancient atx motherboard, 8gb ram,and used an atx power supply to power both the computer and miners. Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS is fine.

I was also able to mine on a macbook, but had to use ubuntu, and a separate power supply for the R606.  i decided to stick with the desktop hardware because i could also run a node off an extra hard drive.