If you have a computer background already then dive in! For a gaming rig try PopOS or Nobara.
PopOS is Ubuntu based and used Gnome. They’re hard at work on a new custom DE that appears Gnome-like. PopOS is made by hardware company System76 to improve upon Ubuntu’s support of newer hardware they wish to sell.
Nobara is Fedora based and recently switched to KDE Plasma which aligns with the Steam Deck. Nobara is specifically tweaked for gaming.
My experience has been that LibreOffice will not correctly render my .csv files when they are above a certain size. Not talking about big data here either like a few thousand rows. For this reason I use OnlyOffice instead.
What do you want to self host? To learn or experiment buy a cheap old x86 box. I get mine at goodwill auction. Otherwise desktop is good if you want something that needs more compute and that you’d spin up as needed vs always on.
This might help with the mouse:
Firefox for personal. I like Edge for work stuff.
I bought the nebula 49. Can’t wait to get my hands on it!
Writing by hand with a pen you like on nice quality paper can be enjoyable. The best for me is when I journal on my typewriter.
I am happy with Proton.
Learn Linux TV
I was also asked this question at 15 while being interviewed by the local Sears. I went on to sell shoes though. Cordless phones would have been cool.
Please, please, please, don’t be caffeine! 🤞
I use Gnome with the pop-os tweaks: shell, launcher, and workspaces. Looking forward to the new COSMIC DE from System76.
I’ve used NetSurf a bit on low spec machines.
It has a laptop style fan for the cpu. I’ve never noticed any noise but I have it off in a corner and near some noisy af parakeets so it’s silent to me.
I am running my home server on a Dell 3050 from shopgoodwill.com and it was ~$40 without hard drives. It has room for an m2 drive and SSD so I have Ubuntu/Docker on the m2 and all my data on an SSD.
Neat website. I make sure to bookmark the low tech magazine on all machines core 2 duo and older.
Looks great. I’m excited for this project.