if i had to provide a pc for work at home, it’d be a separate machine used exclusively for that, and isolated on its own lan.

since you’re buying parts, you can specifically look for boards with 6-8 (more than that will require a ‘specialty’ board). 8 isn’t impossible to find. start a build on pcpartpicker, go straight to motherboards and filter 8 or more ‘SATA 6Gb/s Ports’, then sort low-to-high on price. you should find a msi pro am4 and an asus prime am5 that are quite reasonably priced and have multiple reputable vendors selling them.

otherwise you’re looking for an expansion card to add to a board you’ve already got or to expand one of those above for even more.

of course, you need the drive bays to hold them all, too. which can be harder to find at a reasonable and affordable price than motherboards and controller cards.

and by ‘illegals’ they mean ‘brown people’ (regardless of origin or nationality or legal status to work here).

linux mint’s “installers” can boot into a live environment.

and even when you do know what you’re doing, you’re probably choosing not to host your own. at least not one that faces the public. a private mail ‘server’ that consolidates mail for you from multiple providers (and sends mail back out the same way) is different.

i have an old wood desk at the office. it just resonates and amplifies noise when i set a desktop form factor external hdd (with its attached rubber feet) on it. it now sits on a couple old-school foam rubber mouse mats.

don’t expect a 19 year old laptop to perform all the tricks something more ‘modern’ can do, such as transcoding video for a streaming media server. also note that a t5600 is not a ulv chip (draws as much as 34w under load, on its own)–so probably not a candidate to run ‘lid down’ without some outside help for cooling.

it’s not fast, it’s not power efficient, it has slow networking (10/100 and 22-year old ‘g’ wifi), and lacks usb3 for ‘tolerable’ speed on extra external storage space—but it will be ‘ok enough’ for learning on.

if you go with something like yunohost or even dietpi, you will pretty much restrict yourself to what it can run and do and how it does it. if you want more ‘control’ or to install things they don’t offer themselves, you’ll need to ‘roll your own’. a base (console only) debian would be a great place to start. popular, stable, and tons of online resources and tutorials.

i use dietpi, which is built upon a minimal debian.

office back in the 9x days you could just use all 1’s.

that’s the one i remember… and the picture of it next to the release countdown at microsoft’s offices.

i think the only things these days for ‘unactivated windows’ (home, pro editions) is inability to ‘customize the desktop’ (change wallpaper, theme…) and occasional activation nags.

it doesn’t quit working or shutdown (iirc enterprise or server trials do that after they expire, though) or quit getting updates or anything like that.

they actually still ‘win’, because you’re still using their platform.

i’ve read more than one book where the elections were like that. the incumbent essentially just faces a vote of confidence before each term. if they lose (no majority support) or are term limited (or otherwise lose their place in office), they get replaced by a random draw from the constituency.

afaik the major pc laptop vendors, dell, lenovo, hp, ms surface… all have at least some models now with glass or haptic trackpad.

you definitely encountered similar performance in windows. the processor isn’t speedy, by any stretch. kaby lake u-series i3 is slower than a desktop 4th gen i3.

that’s because lmde is literally that… an escape plan for when (not ‘if’, imho) canonical shits the bed.

my general rule is to wait until at least the first point release or major update for any ‘new’ version of an os. so i won’t be doing anything significant with trixie for a few months–just some testing on spare hardware similar to what it might end up on.

while i’m waiting for the new release glitches and bugs to get worked out, or at least identified, dietpi and lmde will get updated to the new stable branch. those will be my first use of trixie when the time comes. my actual bookworm desktop won’t see an upgrade til next year some time.

captive portal detection, certificate status verification, and iirc server settings updates. yes. none of them are ‘absolutely required’ but they do exist to improve the reliability and secure operation of the program–and none are secret nasty spying telemetry. just turn those particular settings off as desired.

if you haven’t added the flathub repository to your new debian kde desktop install, discover will only show you packages from debian’s repositories that were automatically configured during installation… even if you’ve added the flatpak ‘backend’ from inside discover–flathub still has to be added to your sources (see step 3 in link above).

once you have multiple sources of an application (for instance, ‘vlc’), discover will add a ‘sources’ pulldown (top right, next to the ‘install’ button) where you can choose debian system package or flatpak (or snap, if configured).

which source you use is entirely up to you. on my own debian desktop, i usually stick with debs if it has what i’m looking for, as i’ve chosen debian and have accepted their pace at which new software is added. if i wanted ‘bleeding edge’ i would have installed something else entirely on it. but you can certainly go ‘all flatpak’ if you wanted to.

cookies are just text. they could literally contain an ip address or a hash or other identifier that refers to one.

spotify can’t directly obtain data from a linkedin cookie. but ad networks and other ‘third parties’ could provide ‘targeting’ or even identifying information to them.

use a different browser profile, or better–an entirely different browser–for vpn browsing.