That idle power consumption doesn’t seem right. That’s less than a Raspberry Pi.

As long as the PC isn’t being connected to the internet, there’s no reason you can’t just keep running an old kernel.

Banking can be done in person at the bank. Games and media can be pirated.

Software algorithms should not be patentable.

I used to run RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 1 and it was able to play most of the SNES games I tried. Of course that was with no shaders or upscaling.

Because websites and browsers have gotten way more bloated. If you don’t need a web browser, you can get by with a lot less RAM.

The server version requires 1.5 GB of RAM. That’s still rather bloated considering Debian only requires 512 MB.

Optar would be a much better choice than QR codes if you want to store lots of data on microfiche. It stores about 200 kB per page.

Download some live boot images, use Rufus to write them to flash drives, boot them up and try them out. I would suggest starting with something like Mint or Fedora. When you find one you like, back up your data, run the installer and follow the prompts.

A lot of distros disable the functions of the magic sysrq key for security reasons. If it’s enabled, it should work as long as the system is still capable of reading keyboard inputs.

That’s the Unix Epoch. The time and date in Linux and Unix is the number of seconds since then.

Everyone should set it to 1970-01-01.

Access points and routers are usually separate once you get away from the consumer grade stuff. The people that run OPNsense at home often use MikroTik or Ubiquiti access points.

There’s also the Belling-Lee connector. It’s been around since 1922 and is still commonly used for radio and TV antennas in Europe.

$150 will get you a mini PC that you can run OPNsense on. Hopefully they don’t ban WiFi access points next.

One of the better free options is FreeDNS, but you are limited to 5 records.

If you want your own domain, I would suggest Porkbun. They have an API that can be used for dynamic DNS.

You shouldn’t have any issues with MakeMKV and normal blurays. 4K blurays can only be ripped with certain drives and they need custom firmware.

If you don’t want to write native code, then make a PWA. At least those don’t run a separate copy of chrome for each program.

Gnome Disk Utility lets you manage the mount points from a GUI. There are probably other programs that can do it too.

You can use stunnel to make your VPN look like HTTPS.