Some MediaTek WiFi cards are not supported. I had to replace one in a laptop.

The Pi Zero 2w will provide more than enough performance to stream a movie over Wireguard.

How much throughput do you need? The Pi Zero 2w will be fine on a DSL or cable connection, but it will limit your bandwidth on fiber.

Mod Organizer 2 works great with wine and proton. Installation is a bit complicated though. The recent versions of MO2 require wine 9 or newer.

The GPU won’t have any issues encoding several video streams at the same time. That’s not really necessary though. The cameras will do the encoding for you. Just set the bitrate and framerate that you want on the camera and pass that through. Most cameras support two streams, the secondary stream is usually limited to SD though. All of my Hikvision cameras support RTSP. It’s mostly just the consumer grade crap that only works with the manufacturers cloud service so they can spy on you or restrict features whenever they want.

Don’t make the mistake I did and buy any Hikivision stuff from Amazon. They are all grey market and the firmware can’t be updated. I tried to update one of mine and now the user interface is stuck in Chinese. You have to get them from an authorized distributor.

Edit from MS-DOS still came with Windows XP and I think it was in 7 too. Did they remove it in later versions?

The only real solution is to always keep your source files. PDFs are not intended to be edited.

I just keep all of my music in an NFS share on my NAS and play it with Rhythmbox or VLC. I keep a compressed copy on the SD card in my phone to listen to when I’m not home.

I ran Damn Small Linux on it about 15 years ago. That worked pretty well and it would even run a web browser. It would probably boot Tiny Core Linux, but there wouldn’t be much RAM left to run any programs. The motherboard supports 128MB, but it’s not really worth the cost to upgrade it though.

I may see about resurrecting that computer. I’ve got an old Motorola police radio that I would like to reprogram to operate in the 2M ham band and I think that PC will run the programming software.

If you only need 2D, there is LibreCAD.

I’ve run Linux on a 166MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM. There’s not much modern software that will run on that hardware though.

The power usage will be a bit higher, but it will also have higher performance. They can have 2.5G ethernet and a couple of NVMe SSDs. The Raspberry Pi 5 only has one lane of PCIe 2.0, so it will be very bandwidth limited if you use a PCIe switch to connect a 2.5G NIC and an SSD.

There are also a lot of mini PCs that are comparable in price to a Raspberry Pi 5 once you factor in the cost of a case, SD card, and power supply for the Pi.

Make sure you have a font installed that supports emoji such as the Noto emoji font.

like “only update X when on WiFi”.

Most Linux software only updates when the user tells the package manager to update it.>

It doesn’t, but running everything through a tunnel to get IPv4 access would. OP wants only the IPv4 traffic to go over a tunnel.

The game developers could if they wanted to, but I hope they won’t. I will not willingly install a rootkit on any of my computers. I wouldn’t buy or pirate a game that requires one even if it could run on Linux. I don’t even like running user level anti cheat, but at least that can be run in a sandbox.

My NAS uses a similar amount of power. The drives use most of the power. The PC uses less than 20W on its own. Upgrading to a couple of large helium filled drives will save a good bit of power. SATA drives tend to use a little less power than SAS drives too.

Have you tried Tiny Core Linux? It supports a 486DX, but they recommend a Pentium 2. I think the biggest issue you will have is finding programs that will run on such old hardware.

If you stretch, kink, or squish a CAT5 cable, there is a good chance that it will not work at 1G even if none of the conductors are broken or shorted. Sometimes they will initially connect at 1G, then fall back to 100M after some random amount of time making troubleshooting more annoying.