It’s certainly doable and something like that was my setup for a few years. There isn’t much in the way of distros or software packages that provide such a ‘personal multiseat’ configuration out of the box.

I’d suggest starting with anything graphically intensive running on bare metal and setting up a VM with virt-manager / Virtualbox / etc. for the NAS part. Get a couple of disks specifically to pass through to the NAS VM, forward its ports to LAN, and connect to them on the host as you would any other machine. For a desk further away, you may be able to get away with a KVM extender, but I can’t say I’ve any experience with them.

If you try to virtualize everything like I did, there’s a couple of hurdles:

• Much time and manual configuration in the command line is needed
• Atrocious graphical and input latency on remote connections
• Very high RAM usage
• Input glitches and general slowness on the VM with GPU passthrough, remained unresolved despite scouring tutorials from people who somehow managed to get buttery-smooth gaming in a VM
• Lots of bandwidth used while updating all of the VMs. Probably optimizable, but not out of the box.

Go for AMD if you can, but NVIDIA hasn’t given me much trouble either. Make sure to install the driver from your distro’s repo, not NVIDIA’s website. IMO, this is less of an issue if you decide to pass through the GPU to a VM since any NVIDIA driver shenanigans will be contained to the VM.

Probably eye-ther, but eee-ther on random occasion

Very much the opposite, but probably because what I ended up doing follows their image of success. Become highly educated in a technical field and then make a decent amount of money (on paper, in this economy). Not sure I would have the same approval if I wanted to become, say, a graphic designer.

Debian stable:

• Works on all of my devices, none of which are newer than 2019
• Compatibility with all of the software that I use day to day
• I like my system set up in a very particular way and the stability makes upkeep simple
• I was a holdout on older Windows versions before I moved to Linux, so getting new features at all is already exciting

It bugs me how, within a month after Apple releases a new iPhone, small-time manufacturers put together the hardware, custom ROMs, and tooling to pump out bespoke knock-offs of the latest model. Which sell for maybe $200. While we’re stuck worrying that the development of a new Linux phone, with completely ordinary hardware by today’s standards, might get mismanaged to hell or ends up costing a fortune.

This thread is kind of depressing to read. What a privilege it is to have supportive parents.

Makes me realize that I shouldn’t put off having a quality phone call with my parents so much. There will always be more work, but there won’t always be more quality time with them.

In an academic setting, LibreOffice is a good substitute if:

• Documents will not be passed back and forth between LibreOffice and MS Office for collaboration
• Teachers accept assignments in PDF format

I got away with using LibreOffice in university since:

• Opening and reading files prepared in MS Office almost always works
• Every formatting option I had used in MS Office was also present in LibreOffice
• Professors accepted work I prepared in LibreOffice and exported as PDF to guarantee that my formatting stays intact
• Students and professors almost always used Google Docs for collaborative work

From experience, a moderately-formatted document with images will survive about 3 round trips between MS Office and LibreOffice before something breaks (things on the page get completely rearranged or get stuck and can’t be moved or deleted).

And despite having used LibreOffice for several years now, I still feel like I’m having a stroke when I see the default interface. For sanity, either set the user interface (under View menu) to tabbed or sidebar, or customize the toolbar to match that of Google Docs.

Lovely day of volunteering. Not sure how to tackle the mountain of work waiting for me on Monday though.

I have a mug that’s twice the volume of a condensed soup can. I’ll put an arbitrary amount of water in the electric kettle, dump the contents of one can into the mug and then fill the rest with the boiling water. Result is soup at the perfect temperature for consumption. Makes me feel better than having instant ramen when I’m lazy imo.

I didn’t

Electric kettles with plastic parts that touch boiling water, particularly the removable mesh thing. It’s like a microplastic infuser that’s good for about 300 liters, after which it falls apart. Then the kettle doesn’t know when to stop automatically and you can’t buy a replacement mesh piece because they discontinued that model of kettle last year.

I now have a kettle that doesn’t have the funny mesh, but if you don’t open the lid while pouring, the scalding hot water just runs down the side.

The old fridge had condenser coils out in the open and you’d just dust them. The new fridge has them under the unit and I can see quite a bit of dust accumulating on them. But I’ve no clue how to clean them without tipping the entire fridge over.

Also, the newfangled rice cookers. The nonstick coating in them chips off much easier than in regular pots and pans. Then there’s 3 or so gaskets, one of which is impossible to remove without breaking the lid. I really hate cleaning rubber gaskets, especially if there’s a perfectly fine way to design something without them.

I’ve also wondered about this too. In my opinion, at least several layers, but not more than 25. No good reason, it just feels right to me.

It’s also likely that the mSATA slot is bottlenecked since it runs at SATA II speeds while the 2.5 bay runs at SATA III speeds. This becomes noticeable with heavy swapping or flatpak updates. I found this out the hard way because I want my boot drive on my 256 GB mSATA instead of the 2 TB SSD that I use for media and backups.

Of all the e-waste components I’ve tried out, the one used part that should not give you any trouble is the CPU. Except in the case of 13/14th gen Intel CPUs degrading, the CPU should be either dead or alive with no surprises.

An Intel Atom notebook with 2GB RAM and 32GB storage acquired for $200 on Black Friday. Despite many attempts to optimize it, it was practically unusable 4 years in. If I had the foresight to buy a used ThinkPad for the same price instead, it could have been my daily driver to this day.

Also a faux leather wallet. The “leather” started turning to goo and powder about a year in. Some of my cards and my wallet photo still have some of those decayed fake leather bits stuck on the edges or rubbed in.

Side-loaded apps could be anything, ad-free or ad-infested. It costs money to publish an app to Apple’s App Store, even if the app is going to be free. For commercial developers, that’s an incentive to monetize and recuperate the $99/year Apple charges. For open source developers, that’s a barrier to entry.

On the Android side, free and ad-free apps are correlated with being open source. Many open source developers are philosophically against publishing on Google’s Play Store, or at least know that their main audience does not want to sign up for a Google account to download it from the Play Store. But that’s not saying that the Play Store is inherently superior to Apple’s App Store. It just happens to overlap with open source apps that are guaranteed to be free and ad-free, given the lower barrier to entry (one-time $25 fee).

This is more an exception than the rule so far, but one final case is an open-source developer wants to publish their perfectly safe and legitimate app, but is rejected. This happened to Organic Maps on the Play Store.

Contrast these app stores with F-Droid, where users do not need to sign up for an account and developers can publish for free without handing over personally identifiable information. However, it relies on a form of sideloading that is not possible on iOS devices, at least outside of the EU.

I’m also considering this when it comes time for me to update. I would:

• Throw a spare SSD or equal or greater size into a USB enclosure
• Clone my boot drive to it using Clonezilla
• Remove the original boot drive to avoid UUID collisions
• Boot off the spare SSD and perform the update

If you still are using it, try this:

• Disable RAM Plus under Battery and device care > Memory
• Reduce transparency and blur under Accessibility > visibility enhancements
• Disable the home screen media page, if it’s there
• Use 3-button navigation instead of gestures

Got just a bit more performance out of a friend’s A03s that way.

My workplace has an e-waste bin we can rummage through and I’ve scavenged many an upgrade for my machines. If it weren’t for that, I’m not sure I would have the same confidence troubleshooting used parts. Making a couple of assumptions here, but upgrading with used parts one by one would be a good starting point. I’ve had good luck returning eBay items that were described as working but were in fact defective.

You had me in the first part, but that last paragraph reeks of Apple fanboyism.

Anyway, I also had an iPad 2 back in the day and it was a pretty solid machine coming from media players and digital photo frames of yore. Also an amazing mobile gaming experience compared to the cramped iPod touch or iPhone of the time. But terribly frustrating if you wanted anything outside the walled garden, even something as ubiquitous as Adobe Flash support.

What plumbercraic says though is absolutely the case today. Some of my family use Apple devices. Mind-blowing what ad- and subscription-infested apps they endure on the regular. Sometimes they’ll ask me to recommend friendlier apps and I really wish iOS had its F-Droid equivalent. Yes, the Play Store also has terrible apps, but when only the Apple App Store exists, I have to spend time hunting for the one good app, which could just as well enshittify the next year.