That hardware still has plenty of power for basic use. It should be good for another 10 years running Linux.

Keep the firewall on dedicated hardware. You don’t want your whole network going down because you have to do some work on the server.

I had an upgrade fail and completely break the install a long time ago. I haven’t tried a distribution upgrade since then. I just format and install a new distro every couple of years. It cleans out all the crap I end up with from 3rd party repositories and stuff I’ve compiled from source. I’m sure upgrades probably work a lot better now though.

I did have Arch running on one of my laptops for quite a while, but I quit using it after it started falling apart.

I’ve got a 16MB MMC card that I use as an offline backup for my password manager database. It’s old enough that it uses SLC flash, so I don’t have to worry about data retention time.

I use it as a modifier key for all of the shortcuts I create since nothing uses it by default.

Just use a mini PC and pirate everything. The amazon fire interface sucks anyways. Every streaming service is in a different app and you have to remember which app to use for each show.

There is Tiny Core Linux if you want something small like the original DSL.

You can use the 3040 to build an AllStar node.

About the only thing I would consider using QLC for is games since write speed doesn’t matter and they can just be downloaded again if they get corrupted.

What kills the batteries is keeping them at 100% charge all the time, especially when the laptop is hot. Some laptops do have the ability to limit the maximum charge. Setting the maximum charge to 60-80% when the laptop is going to be plugged in for a while will extend the battery life. It is necessary to occasionally do a full charge to keep the capacity sensor calibrated though.

The T480s only has one DIMM socket. The other memory channel has 8GB soldered to the motherboard.

It’s not hard to make a useful website that’s small. You just have to avoid using javascript libraries and keep images to a minimum. There are a number of static web page generators if you don’t want to write HTML yourself.

Keep in mind that a 50 kB page is about a 15 second load on a typical dial-up connection. Before high speed internet, almost everyone kept their web pages small.

Mumble supports text chat and images too. Right click on a channel or user and select send message. There is an insert image button in the message window. I wish they would make it so you could just drag and drop an image though.

Yes, that’s why they don’t care about copyrighted content outside of Russia.

They tend to require installing a rootkit on your own computer. I wouldn’t buy them even if they did support Linux.

There are USB NFC readers. Someone could add support for that to Klipper.

Dumb TVs are still readily available. They are intended for commercial use and will suck for games or movies though.

Well, they have had a lot of vulnerabilities. Most people won’t even update the firmware let alone install OpenWRT on them.

You can open “Keyboard Shortcuts” in the menu and change them to whatever you want.

I would assume that it will work as long as Deno is installed somewhere that’s in $PATH. They still haven’t merged the pull request that will make yt-dlp use Deno yet. There should be more information once they release the new version. Yt-dlp 2025.10.22 included a fix that gets some formats working again though.