Generally build quality and repairability. Any IT department will favour devices that can have common failure points (battery, SSD, screen) replaced with a single screwdriver, and with that comes the need for stronger chassis and modular designs because you can’t rely on glueing everything in. Also, with the exception of Apple fanbois, IT techs are quick to condemn manufacturers who let pro grade kit standards slip, which could mean a few years of lost sales.

I’m on a variable rate electricity tariff and I use Home Assistant and iLO to power things on and off automatically, so most of the time it pulls 30-50W. At peak it pulls north of 1.5KW but that’s really rare.

Makes mine look boring.

i = (1÷Md)×blow

GIMP is an English acronym.

I just 100% all-the-time will always want someone to release a fork of GIMP that is totally identical in every way but has a different name. I can’t tell you the amount of time it was rejected by schools because of it.

Well a miscarriage is basically an abortion and an abortion is basically a murder.

/s, to be clear, but some people will say that sincerely and in some parts of the world they get to write the law.

Just stare unblinking at a clock. When it suddenly jumps forwards several hours subtract the difference. Easy.

Doesn’t work when crossing time zones or during daylight savings transitions.

“The Epstein files contain the entirety of Project Gutenberg in twenty different fonts.”

What about you?

Fhourthi innit?

The thing I find particularly annoying about W is that they could have just forked BlueSky and set up the first serious AtProtocol federation.

Can we be like the Beneluxians or Scandinavians instead?

Yeah, that’s not a straw, though. It’s like a redwood. A forest of redwoods.

My OG Pebble is still going strong, but I have pre-ordered the new Pebble Time 2 because it just looks like a straight-up upgrade. The fact that the new Pebble company is fully supporting the old devices makes me want to buy their new devices even more.

No, it’s nothing sinister. Most user-facing business workstations run Windows and have a Windows COA or, more recently, have the Windows product key baked into firmware, so it’s easy-peasy for the seller to install a fresh, working copy of Windows. The Dell WYSE PCs are Thin Clients, which are used to access Windows (or another OS) running on another PC or a server somewhere so the Thin Client doesn’t have or need a license; this means it’s not easy for the seller to install a hassle-free version of Windows since it will immediately start pestering the user for a license and for novices they’ll assume the computer is broken and return it. The lightweight Thin Client OS they use is neither use nor ornament outside an enterprise settings so they don’t bother reinstalling that. Obviously the seller could install Linux but the majority of people who are okay with Linux would probably sneer and say “ugh, Distro X? I only use Distro Y” and reinstall anyway, so it’s easier just to sell it without an OS. Ask me how I know all this.

Edit to add: some thin clients do have strange architectures and use weird OSes but that’s not a concern here. Aside from size and specs, the only material difference between the WYSE 5070 and a “normal” PC is that the EFI will have limited configuration options, but unless you’re planning on installing Windows XP that’s probably not an issue.

Edit to add to edit to add: I just found this https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/5070/. It’s a detailed breakdown of the device and mentions that it could be speced with an onboard SPF NIC? That’s crazy. It also shows someone modding a second NVMe drive into it.

Yeah, that’s pretty good. The only things I’d be wary of with that particular listing are that it doesn’t come with a power supply (these normally take laptop-style PSUs) and 64GB of storage might not be enough once you start to get to grips with it though you could easily upgrade the NVMe SSD (or hook up an external USB drive).

But aside from that it’s a smart little system and will handle a the setup I described with no issues. The J4105 can be sluggish with multitasking in a desktop environment but for ‘headless’ setups it’s excellent and uses very little power.

No.

Unless there’s something about the RPi that you really want - GPIO, say - it’s not a good choice, especially not the 1GB model you mentioned. Virtually any used desktop or laptop PC from the last fifteen years will be more useful; if you’ve not done so already, search EBay for “USFF”. Those are desktop PCs the size of paperback books. Businesses love them and have them in fleets which means they tend to get cycled out naturally after a few years; the marketplace is full of them and can be had for €30 and up. Unlike a RPi 3, they usually come with storage included (and a proper SSD/HD rather than an SD card), a good quality power supply, plenty of I/O and, if course, a nice solid protective case.

Example: https://ebay.us/m/TxL4yR

Slap PROXMOX on that and you’ll have the seed of a solid home lab. With 8GB RAM you’ll have enough to run VMs for OpenWRT, Home Assistant, Yuno Host, and still have enough resources left over for your Debian tinkering box. Plus, by using PROXMOX you do away with the need for a KVM since you can either SSH into the VM or use PROXMOX’s web UI to access the console and use a GUI if that’s more your speed.

Get a domain name and use that for your email; most providers let you set a catch-all that delivers everything to one place. So if you got, say, strawberrypigtails.egg you could give every service you sign up for a different address: ebay@strawberrypigtails.egg, sdf.org@strawberrypigtails.egg, pornhub@strawberrypigtails.egg and so on. Then, when you start getting loads of spam, you can look at where the email was sent to rather that where it came from and either take action against that service or just block emails sent to that address.

You can pry my T440 from my cold dead hands or, at the least, give me a bit of notice so I can fish out my X220. Or my X80. Or my other X220. Or my T420… I might have a problem.