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.

Have you tried using LibreOffice Draw? It works pretty well for editing PDFs. Just make sure you have all of the fonts that the PDF uses before opening it.

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.

That’s why I pirate unless it’s DRM free and doesn’t require an internet connection after downloading the installer.

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.

The radiators dissipate the heat as infrared radiation. They work as long as they are pointed away from the sun or earth.

If they couldn’t get rid of the heat, there would be no satellites or space stations.

The radiators would be about the same size as the solar panels. Both would have to be huge to run a rack full of GPUs.

Cloudflare won’t even allow you to use your own nameserver. Avoid them like the plague.

If the RAM was cheap and performed well, I would buy it. I wouldn’t trust a no name hard drive though.

DDR5 will probably stick around for a long time if DDR6 is not affordable.

The Chinese fabs should be producing lots of RAM by 2030.