I bought a 21 inch 1080p Viewsonic monitor from a thrift store just the other day for $6. I got it just for this use case.
I had a spare for this purpose up until about a month ago when the backlight went out on one of my daily drivers.
Also, a couple of days ago I got a pretty nice steelcase apex 3 keyboard with RGB lights for $5.
I use Debian everywhere but if I need a Live Linux environment to recover files, clone a drive, wipe a drive, or really anything else I use ventoy and a Linux mint iso.
I’m a cool grandpa with old hardware.
How did that exchange go?
They try to tell you that you can’t use your last name?
Ubuntu is great. I used it for years.
This is going to sound petty, but one thing that annoyed me for years was the ads for their enterprise crap that they put into the terminal whn running updates.
I tried Debian 12 when it came out and I love it. I switched all of my systems to Debian.
I would much rather use a community driven distro than a corporate one.
Also, I applied for a job with Ubuntu The recruiter sent me the most insane take home written interview packet. I took a look at it and decided I didnt want to work with a bunch of people who would fill that packet out.
Just for shiggles, I setup and ran a minecraft Java server on an old phone for a little while. I did this through Termux.
It was surprisingly good.
Most people get a new phone every 2-3 years. If people use their 2 most recent phones as simple servers, then these are not 10 year old devices.
Moved from a junky setup where I was forwarding my domain mail to gmail. And sending mail through gmail using the smtp server provided by my web host.
I was having too many issues.
I switched to fastmail. It is quite good. And you can get some free basic web hosting included with your paid service.
TBF, if a potential partner is super excited about something you never heard of, looking into it is a good thing.
Conservatives, and other assholes, are good about hiding their crazy behind seemingly innocent things, like pepe the frog.