External 2.5" HDDs connected via USB for longer term bulk storage and using it as a NAS, a smaller internal NVME SSD for the OS and a larger one (but SATA, so slower) for the directory were torrents go to.

The different drive performances fit my usage pattern just fine whilst optimizing price per GB.

External 3.5" would be cheaper for bulk storage but the 2.5" are a leftover from when I was more constrained in terms of physical space.

Well, the N100 does have a lot more breathing space in terms of computing power, so it’s maybe a better bet for something you want to use for a decade or more, and that remote control I linked to above does work fine, except for the power button (which will power your Linux off but won’t power it back on).

I actually tried an Android TV Box (which is really just and SBC in the same range of processing power as the Pi) for this before going for the Mini PC and it was simply not as smooth operating.

That Mini-PC has enough computing power room (plus the right processing extensions) that I can be torrenting over OpenVPN on a 1Gb/s connection whilst watching a video from a local file and it’s not at all noticeable on the video playback.

Kodi install instructions are here

I don’t use docker, I use lubuntu with normal packages. So for example Kodi is just installed from the Team Kodi PPA repository (which, granted, is outdated, but it works fine and I don’t need the latest and greatest) and just set it up to be auto-started when X starts so that on the TV it’s as if Kodi is the interface of that machine.

Qbittorrent is just the server only package (qbittorrent-nox) which I control remotelly via its web interface and the rest is normal stuff like Samba.

After the inital set up, the actual linux management can be done remotelly via ssh.

That said, LibreELEC is a Linux distro which comes with Kodi built-in (it’s basically Kodi and just enough Linux to run it), so assuming it’s possible to install more stuff in it might be better - only found out about it when I had my setup running so never got around to try it. LibreELEC can even work in weaker hardware such as a Raspberry Pi or some of its clones.

Also you can get Kodi as a Flatpak which works out of the box in various Linux distros so if you need the latest and greatest Kodi plus a full-blown Linux distro for other stuff you might do the choice of distro based on supporting flatpack and being reasonably lightweight (I actually originally went for Lubuntu exactly because it uses a lightweight Window Manager and I expected that N100 mini-pc to need it, though in practice the hardward can probably run a lot more heavy stuff than that, though lighter stuff means the CPU load seldom goes up significativelly hence the fan seldom turns on and so the thing is quiet most of the time and you only hear the fan spinning up and then down again once in a while even in the Summer).

As for docker, there are a lot of instructions out there on how to install Kodi with Dockers, but I never tried it.

Also you might want to get a remote like this, which is a wireless remote with a USB adapter, not because of the air-mouse thing (frankly, I never use it) but simply because the buttons are mapped to exactly the shortcuts that Kodi uses, so using it with Kodi in Linux is just like using a dedicated remote for a TV Media Box - in fact all those thinks are keyboard shortcuts (that remote just sends keypresses to the PC when you press a button) and they keyboard shortcuts for media players seem to be a standard.

It really depends on what you’re doing with it and on what old PCs you have available.

I have an N100 Mini-PC at home in my living room connected to my TV which is both a home server and a TV-Box using Kodi (I even have a remote for it).

Having modern image and video decoding in hardware is pretty useful when I’m using it as a TV Box (there is zero stutter with it), whilst the rest of the time the thing mostly sits doing some low CPU-intensive server tasks (mainly torrenting and SMB server stuff).

Also, it’s a small box that fits fine on my TV stand without standing out and runs silent pretty almost all of the time.

Further, I don’t have any low power consuming old PCs around - the best are some chunky old notebooks, the rest are old gaming PCs which eat more power idle than the mini PC does at full load - and even the notebooks aren’t that low power as all that.

Mind you, for many years I used an old Asus EEE PC (a very small notebook running Linux) as home file server (with external HDs) and had a separated dedicated hardware TV Media Server box playing files from it, but eventually that PC stopped working and I found out I could just use my Router as a file server.

Last but not least, judging for how long I kept using my TV Media Server boxes (which over almost 2 decades I had 2 different ones and which as dedicated hardware could not easilly be upgraded when new video compression standards came out) 10+ years is definitelly my time-frame for using that Mini-PC.

All this to say that you should consider using old hardware, especially if you have some around and it’s task appropriate (like I did before using an old Asus EEE PC as a home file server), but also take in account what you’re going to do it and consider if new hardware won’t be better over the timespan you will likely be using it and if the being able to get a more task appropriate form factor (like how having a little box-size Mini PC lets me have it in my living room on a TV stand next to my TV and my fiber router) is worth it.

In summary, before you get hardware you should ponder a bit about what you intend to do with it before you decide what to get, don’t be afraid of using stuff you already have and also don’t be afraid to get new stuff if it’s actually justified by hardnosed reasons rather than merely some variant of the “new stuff smell” psychological effect when buying new.

The only thing I get from meeting again people I haven’t seen for decades is to, using the abilities I’ve been acquiring with time and life experience to read other people beyond the superficial, find out that most many haven’t really mature much from the people I knew and at times how much I misjudged them back in the old days when I was very naive and ran around pretty lost.

The “I’m better than that” feeling would be highly satisfying if I was a different kind of person, but it’s actually just sad that some people turn out to either having always been less than I made them up to be in my mind or failed to actually turn into well balanced mature adults.

The other possibility is that it’s all in my mind and I’m just deceiving myself, as having become more more self-deluded when it comes to others with time looks exactly the same from the inside as having become a little wiser in interpreting others.

In summary: Projection.

The chosen form of most accusations can be explained by the one doing the accusing having reached their own conclusions about the likely actions and motivations of others by thinking “What would I do in their place?”.

I vaguely remember that they were already preloading the Office DLLs way back in Windows 95 or XP days.

Would you trust HP to make any kind of consumer hardware which is supposed to run networked and has their own OS variant?

One would expect it would at the very least come pre-enshittified, possibly with some sort of subscription service to enable certain hardware features.

This ain’t the pre-Carly Fiorina HP.

That’s why they are superior!

Company Town Halls are “we listen to you” theatre.

Modern large companies behave towards their employees the same way they behave towards their customers: they use marketing to influence them into doing what’s best for the C-suite, the Board and (usually) shareholders.

In Tech specifically this kind of crap has been common since the 90s even in Startups (as part of the “pay them with hope, sense of belonging and pride rather than money” technique), though the big Tech companies are the most extreme in this kind of stuff.

Well, they’re not domesticated enough to let me pet them unless I catch a chick which fell off a nest.

Sparrows.

Forced diversity characters are generally just cringe.

Characters who are normal people who just happen to be female, of a minority ethnicity, non-heterosexual and so on are generally as good as all other characters because that’s just about people living live in an imaginary situation, so just like in the real world not everybody there is a white heterosexual male and people who aren’t white heterosexual males are, just like the white heterosexual males ones, not some stereotyped cartoon cutout of a person.

(That said, in Action movies, especially XX century, often all characters are stereotyped cartoon cutouts of a person)

This also dovetails with how Modern Acting techniques work: good actors will naturally play more believable characters in more believable situations because the actor also has their own version of “suspension of disbelief” going on.

If you want a neutral metaphor, it’s like the difference between seeing a scene in a Film or TV Series which is pretty obviously product placement for a cola brand were one or more of the characters are using said product in a way that makes sure its brand is seen and mentioned vs a perfectly normal scene were somebody just happens to be drinking something that looks like a cola - the entire vibe is totally different between having something which is not a natural story element shoved there to fulfill objectives other than telling a good story and just telling a good story that naturally reflects the real world in its many facets hence all that’s there just feels natural.

LOL!

Reduced to name calling.

Good try, shame you don’t have the chops (as the way you express yourself gave away very early on)

I very explicitly said the whole thing is slower than the speed of light (much slower even) and even pointed out why: at the most basic of levels, the way charged particles push each other without contact is the electromagnetic force, meaning photons, but the actual particles still have to move and unlike photons they do have mass so the result is way slower than the speed of light.

To disprove the idea that a push on a solid object can travel faster than the speed of light (which is what the OP put forward), pointing out that at its most basic level the whole thing relies on actually photons which travel at the speed of light, will do it.

There was never any lower limit specified in my response because there is no need to go into that to disprove a theory about the upper limit being beyond a certain point. (Which makes that ironic statement of yours about the speed of sound-waves quite peculiar as it is mathematically and logically unrelated to what I wrote)

Going down into the complexity of the actual process, whilst interesting, isn’t going to answer the OPs question in an accessible and reasonably short manner using language that most people can understand.

And how do you think the information that an electrically charged particle is moving reaches other electrically charged particles…

You’re pushing the atoms on your end, which in turn push the next atoms, which push the next ones and so on up to the atoms at the end of the rod which push the hand of your friend on the moon.

As it so happens the way the atoms push each other is electromagnetism, in other words sending photons (same thing light is made of) to each other but these photons are not at visible wavelengths so you don’t see them as light.

So pushing the rod is just sending a wave down the rod of atoms pushing each other with the gaps between atoms being bridged using photons, so it will never be faster than the speed at which photons can travel in vacuum (it’s actually slower because part of the movement of that wave is not the lightspeed-travelling photons bridging the gaps between atoms but the actual atoms moving and atoms have mass so they cannot travel as fast as the speed of light).

In normal day to day life the rods are far too short for us to notice the delay between the pushing the rod on one end and the rod pushing something on the other end.

According to a post from our Admin, in the small instance I’m in there has been a sudden influx of new users (about 200) in the last day or so (as new users have to be approved, somebody is getting cramps on their approve finger).

(Guess Anarchism and Piracy could technically count as NSFW in most workplaces, especially the latter)

Yeah, I have a similar situation with Borderlands 2 not running on my machine with Windows 7 but running just fine in Linux with Proton (which is Steam’s branch of Wine).

It seems to me that Linux with Wine is actually better at backwards compatibility for Windows applications than Windows itself.

PS: Also a handful of old games I have from GoG that wouldn’t run on Windows run just fine with Wine on Linux.