I don’t work in IT/Tech at all, but I’ve been an enthusiast since I was young, at first piggybacking off of my dad, then developing my own interests as I got into high school and college. I started self-hosting because I found it interesting and as time progressed I saw the benefits of operating things locally. I only host things within my own network though, because I’m not yet comfortable with how to safely set up external access.

Teacher here; this is the first thing I do on day one with new students! You want to build a classroom community of mutual respect; failure to do so makes for a hostile classroom and a wasted year.

Let me pop in as a high school teacher in the US. I make decent pay, but it took me over a decade climbing the pay ladder to reach this point. It’s only been in the last five years that I’ve made enough to afford the mortgage on a house (well, prior to all of the rate hikes, but that’s another issue entirely). But there’s another problem: You’re expected to put in 10% of the value (even with first-time buyer incentives) as a down payment (I last looked with any seriousness in '22). I have yet to be able to put away 5% of the average costs in my region, much less 10%. Every time I start building back up, other costs drain most or all of that within a year or two. Unless the housing market bursts big time, I’m not likely to be able to afford a home anytime soon. Note: I would rather keep renting than take a variable-rate mortgage; the last three years have seen previously affordable mortgages with variable rates go sky-high.

On the hardware from the early '00s in my collection I’ve had good results from AntiX and Q4OS.

It took about 25 systems of searching to find my first one; I also found the updated ice world foliage in that same system, pretty cool stuff!

My first was SUSE followed shortly thereafter by the initial release of Fedora Core. Lots of distro hopping and tinkering later, I run LMDE these days as my daily driver and I distro hop on the other computers in my collection.

It’s my daily driver; the benefits of mint with the stability of a Debian base.

Interesting, my ear cushions are still in decent shape (I’ve only had them about a year now). I bought a replacement set early on just to have in storage, but I’ve yet to need them.

I’ve used it on Pop!_OS and Mint Debian Edition and had to do no setup, the system recognized it as a sound device out of the box. My only issue was in Pop!, where the microphone would output garbage unless I switched audio devices back and forth when I connected to a discord voice room. I’m not entirely sure that was an issue with the device or with discord on that distro, but on Mint I’ve yet to have issues. The software from Steelseries doesn’t have a Linux version, so maybe I’m missing out on some fine tuning, but for my purposes it works great.

If you don’t mind spending the extra money, I can recommend the Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless. I went with these because they can do high quality audio over 2.4GHz wireless, which was a must for me in a wireless headset.

Ah, what a shame, he had some good stuff.

I’m assuming you’re talking about the YouTuber; It’s been since before the pandemic that I’ve watched AvE, what did he do?

For me it was during the development of Diablo 3 when Blizzard acted like a bunch of children over community comments/concerns about the art style/direction of the game. I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on much, honestly.

While I’m not sure the “walking sim” games are what you’re looking for, I’d add Lifeless Planet and maybe Dear Esther. Once you know what’s going on/what happened, there’s not much point in replaying.

Perhaps not as full featured as the others, but I host wiki.js for my knowledge base on my local server.