I must admit that my evil self impatiently waits for a crowdstrike-like event, but with a kernel-level anti-cheat instead. On the more serious side, it baffles me how much the vast majority of people don't care about privacy or security problematics. They literally don't give a f**k.

• France, 1914-1918 war: no elections
• UK, 1939-1945: No general elections were held during the Second World War until Allied victory was assured via acts of Parliament; hence the 1935 House sat until 1945. (per Wikipedia)

Shall I continue?

good old x201 here (i5-720m iirc), 8GB ram, sata ssd. Debian stable. No DE, just stumpWM. Not watching 4k youtube videos but runs fairly well for a 13 years old machine.

Nope. That's called the burden of proof. You started by saying "gimp is shit", it's up to you to prove it, it's not up to the people responding you to disprove your point of view. What you're doing right now is called a fallacy and just totally discredit yourself.

If you are in France, or around Europe and don't mind sending your Pi via mail to them, Faimaison and Tetaneutral do propose small computers hosting in their datacenter racks, Pi type included, but also NUCs, respectively for 24€/month (bit expensive but small structure compared to Tetaneutral edit: it's ~15€/month nowadays) and 5 to 10€ / month. That's just an example. Generally you'll get one IPv4 and one /56 or /64 IPv6 prefix.

You might want to look near your location if there is a LUG, non-profit ISP, or non-profit colocation proposing the same kind of services. You may even meet some nice people! But it's definitely doable at least in Europe.

1Gbps down/700Mbps up here, 35€/month (another french provider), no data caps - for 5 bucks/month more I could have 5Gbps down/1Gbps up, but... well, my home network is still using 1Gbps switches - but all the cabling was built with 10Gbps in mind.

Data caps are pure robbery. We run a non-profit ISP/hosting platform and a non-profit IXP with friends in West France, the only thing you pay (and the only thing end users should have to pay) is goddamn bandwidth.

Recently I used testdisk/photorec to recover photos from a dead sd card. Made a small donation and sent a big thank you to the developer. As you said, sending appreciations and thanks for someone's hard work is an important thing to do, and if applicable, small donations. Right now I'm quite ashamed I've never did the same for Vim while Bram was still alive, especially since Vim is one of the most important tools I daily use :/.

I use Vim since 31 years. Started in 1992, on Amiga with Fred Fish disks. I use Vim daily at work since 20 years. It's like a second home for me, a familiar tool which makes me confident that it'll help me manage whatever task I throw at it. I never had the pleasure to encounter Bram to tell him how much his work helped me throughout the years. I should have sent a "thank you for your hard work" mail when it was still possible. Now I can only send condolences. And some money to the ICCF. That's the least I can do.

Physical machines get stars names: Vega, Arcturus, Polaris, Fomalhaut, Deneb, Antares, Procyon, Algol, Aldebaran... and so on.

Virtual machines naming scheme is more reasonable: [os]-[role][number if needed]. Examples:

• alp-proxy
• talos-controlplane-3, talos-worker-1, talos-worker-6
• deb-storage

Everything runs in a kubernetes cluster hosted on my homelab, except the public services access point which is a VM hosted on a non-profit ISP and service provider infrastructure, which I contribute to, through a wireguard VPN between the VM and home:

Public-facing:

• an old static website (nginx-unprivileged), which was my first website and which I keep online because nostalgia
• Ghost, personal blog
• OpenSMTPd + rspamd + dovecot (dovecot only accessible from home, not public)
• privatebin
• picoshare
• Whoogle + Tor
• SearxNG

Work related (I work from home 75% of time), not public-facing:

• dolibarr ERP for managing prospects and clients billing
• gitea
• bookstack for personal documentation
• edit: forgot Harbor as container registry.
• vaultwarden
• eck-operator
• wireguard operator for personal, family and friends access from outside
• awx operator
• draw.io
• zalando postgresql operator for postgres needs
• mariadb-galera for mariadb needs
• bitlbee-libpurple for all clients' slack needs
• Authentik as OIDC/LDAP/SAML provider (also used to identify family and friends)
• internal DNS (pdns-resolver + powerdns with postgres backend) serving work zone and home zone.

Home stuff, not public-facing:

• Games: Minetest, EQEmu server (Everquest), planar ally, bzflag, veloren
• Home-cinema/music: Jellyfin, Koel, alltube, and the usual tools to share Linux isos.
• Immich to sync photos
• homeassistant (more a PoC than anything else right now)
• mealie for recipes (I like cooking original meals for friends and family) and lunch/dinner planning
• another instance of vaultwarden for family
• piHole to keep the children a bit safer online (notably blocking malware/scams/nsfw sites)

all of this running on a 3 control-planes/6 workers talos linux k8s cluster, itself hosted on a franken-proxmox cluster (a mix of server/"old" desktops/Ryzen NUCs) and a bunch of NAS (VM dedicated NAS, data storage NAS, backup NAS).

• almost everywhere: HAProxy. I like the syntax, ACLs, map files, stick-tables... there's too much to say in a single post, but I use it since 2012 and it never failed me, whatever the need, both at home and at work.
• kubernetes: ingress-nginx. Mostly because it's the first one I tried back in the days and it just works :). Although I should try one of the haproxy based ingresses, or Traefik, which seems interesting too.

Back in the days, I used the SDF free unix shell, which helped me alot to learn more about UNIX basics, and motivated me to iterate my first franken-homelab with bits of old laptops and desktops. If I'm an happy sysadmin nowadays, it's part thanks to SDF.

Then with a bunch of good friends we started our non-profit ISP (circa 2010) and diversified the services we offer to our users (VPS, VPNs, shells, Wiki, BBB, "cloud" (ahem) storage, monthly tutorials and workshops...). Nowadays we have half a rack of servers, and, home-side, my homelab grew (although it's still a franken-lab with NUCs, old desktops and one "real" server). Once again, thanks to SDF for igniting the spark which gave us the will to start our own community of kind and pasionnate people.

With the current reddit debacle, although I don't use SDF services nowadays, I was happy to see that SDF hosts a lemmy instance, because I know the values of the SDF community. So, thank you - again - SDF!