The “original owner no longer wants this windows machine” to “healthy linux/openbsd member of homelab” to “one hard-to-replace part broke, ebay the rest for a profit” pipeline in my home is very real.

Personally, I love having a highly heterogeneous self-hosting setup. My long-term reliability metrics are definitely very bad, but it’s way more fun to set up and maintain, and feels more like a hobby to work with (less like a job).

There was a recent headline about the EoL of Windows with result in so many millions of machines reduced to e-waste.