I haven't read, but I also have to agree from the get-go that enterprise hardware, even retired, is better than consumer level hardware, for different reasons. The other side is that a lot of these notices are about how stuff is going to affect GPUs or upgrading your machines is going to be expensive. We're talking a few hundred bucks for a kit of RAM where our consumer level motherboards don't run well with 64gig of RAM to begin with. But when you go look, businesses that aren't into AI are going to be buying more machines regularly to upgrade. Amazon, Azure, Google, whatever, they need to do their fleet wide upgrades themselves, and they're going to need to upgrade their machines. Granted, ALL of these companies are ALSO doing AI and are ALSO part of the price inflation. No question. So they're basically shooting themselves in the foot by not getting the engineers to make AI more better to work with less memory.

The only thing I'm running above 1Gig is my modem to my ISP. Everything else is 1GigE. We don't do a lot of file transfers, our internet is 1.5GigE (So yeah, I'm technically being short changed by 500mbit, and I don't really care). We DO use bandwidth for gaming, streaming YT and Plex and what not, but beyond that...

Wait, whut? ESXi is free again? When did that happen?? ... not that I care to install it. Just idiotic business practices and such.

No. I'm still trying "Zorin" out on one of the four SSDs I have on my main rig. I have a 4-bay SSD tray that sits in a standard 5.25" bay and can easily remove the SSD with the pull of a lever (Of course, shut down, pull, insert, power up stuffs). Windows loves overwriting MBRs and such, so I want the physical isolation when running Windows. Linux is fine to keep the Windows drives in.

Seems like TUIs are becoming more and more "popular", and although I love the CLI, I prefer the CLI for commands, not things that are graphical. It takes me just as much time to move the mouse to where my eyeballs are at than have to remember where the keybinds are. For me, if I want to control a machine, I'd rather through a web UI where I can get the mouse to where it needs to be due to repetition and frequency of use. It's often faster (For me) to get where I need to be with the flick of a mouse rather than having to hit TAB 30 times. The mouse integration with VIM drives me flip'n batty.

Don't get me wrong. I can see TUIs being useful for monitoring, like htop and that. But to drive and control something as complex as ProxMox or Portainer.... I actually plan on writing a monitoring TUI and tie it into my monitoring systems so that my RPi that sits right in front of me, right between my quad monitors, and it having a 5" LCD on it, I can see immediate alerts that I may need to look at "now" like. I don't need a graphical "thing" to do monitoring, but I really don't need textual macros to navigate around and manage my commands. I'd rather just script out a bash or python or php script to do the damage I seek to do.