If it’s not FOSS, I don’t want it.

Wacom tablets should work with KDE and Wayland. They work great with X11 though.

Good, that’s the way it should be.

RAID isn’t an alternative to a backup. If a second drive fails while rebuilding the RAID-5 array, all of the data will be lost.

The local ISP has been promising fiber for over a decade. They waited until Starlink took most of their customers before they started putting it in.

The Ampere CPUs are nice. They have lots of cores running at a high clock speed, lots of PCIe lanes and socketed ECC RAM.

5G in rural America is terrible. I can’t make a phone call in my house, let alone get an internet connection. I’m not even in a particularly remote area.

There are Starlink dishes everwhere you look here because it’s currently the only real option. It will probably be a while until they get some competition from Amazon.

You don’t even need a CNC machine. Basic hand tools and some pipe are enough to make a zip gun.

Mint does come with a lot of preinstalled software, but I wouldn’t consider it bloated. It’s stuff that most people will use. The MATE and Xfce versions are fairly light.

With Linux, you can get 15+ years out of a PC if you got decent hardware.

It still shows up because the windows boot partition is still there.

If you’re using grub, you can add GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true to /etc/default/grub and run update-grub. That will remove other operating systems from the grub boot menu.

If you install a few Flatpak packages, it will fill it up quickly. You could also make a games directory.

If the computer has a serial port, you can use SLIP to get an internet connection. Then you could host a simple website from it. It will run at dial-up speeds and you may have to write your own software though.

I would delete the first two partitions and put a new partition there to use as /home. Then expand / where /home was.

It’s easy to expand a partition towards the end of the disk. I would not recommend expanding one towards the start of the disk. That would have to move all of the data. It’s slow and much more likely to cause problems.

I wouldn’t suggest messing with a boot partition unless you are comfortable using a live boot disk to reinstall the bootloader if something goes wrong.

It’s a good thing I saved the 24GB of DDR3-1600 from my old laptop. I might actually be able to get some money for it.

You can even buy a USB adapter to connect an 8 inch floppy drive to a modern PC and read 50 year old disks if you want to.

If the battery cooks off inside the data center, it will do some damage. The amount of water that will be required to put it out will do even more damage.

The main reason for wanting a physical copy is so you can sell it when you are done with it. If the data degrades after a couple of years, it doesn’t do much good. A pressed disc will last for decades when taken care of.

If you’re buying a PC for OPNsense or pfSense, look for one with Intel NICs. Realtek NICs tend to be unreliable.

Flash has a limited data retention time. With high capacity QLC flash, that time can be very short.