I have this at home and enjoy it. What will your work use it for?

Resource usage and storage would be the main things to look out for. Octi really does need ssds as hdds will slow it to a crawl, a good amount of ram is nice but not fully a requirement for home use

I dunno if it’s already been mentioned, but there’s VSCodium, it’s vscode without Microsoft

You’d be surprised, check out Hardware Heaven on YouTube, they may have something for you

I use a TP Link ER605 and it works well. I had to ciall my ISP to get it enabled but that says easy.

I know you said you haven’t got any PCI slots available, do you have any M.2 slots available? You might be able to get a M.2 to ethernet if so.

This is sad to see. I have a hOn device which I recently connected to WiFi to see what features it would have. Sadly it had to connect to the internet to work so I didn’t play with it too much. I checked this plug-in out then and was hoping I could use it.

GPU passthrough using Nvidia cards might be a bit tricky. With older cards they would error out when being passed, although this may be different these days.