I don’t work in IT/Tech at all, but I’ve been an enthusiast since I was young, at first piggybacking off of my dad, then developing my own interests as I got into high school and college. I started self-hosting because I found it interesting and as time progressed I saw the benefits of operating things locally. I only host things within my own network though, because I’m not yet comfortable with how to safely set up external access.

While I know you’re being funny, for those unaware, the snakes being referred to with St Patrick were a euphemism for the non-Christian beliefs in Ireland.

Teacher here; this is the first thing I do on day one with new students! You want to build a classroom community of mutual respect; failure to do so makes for a hostile classroom and a wasted year.

Let me pop in as a high school teacher in the US. I make decent pay, but it took me over a decade climbing the pay ladder to reach this point. It’s only been in the last five years that I’ve made enough to afford the mortgage on a house (well, prior to all of the rate hikes, but that’s another issue entirely). But there’s another problem: You’re expected to put in 10% of the value (even with first-time buyer incentives) as a down payment (I last looked with any seriousness in '22). I have yet to be able to put away 5% of the average costs in my region, much less 10%. Every time I start building back up, other costs drain most or all of that within a year or two. Unless the housing market bursts big time, I’m not likely to be able to afford a home anytime soon. Note: I would rather keep renting than take a variable-rate mortgage; the last three years have seen previously affordable mortgages with variable rates go sky-high.

On the hardware from the early '00s in my collection I’ve had good results from AntiX and Q4OS.

It took about 25 systems of searching to find my first one; I also found the updated ice world foliage in that same system, pretty cool stuff!

When our best friends were getting married and we met at the rehearsal dinner. Her best friend had been trying to get us to meet for years (our work schedules and lives in general always kept us from meeting). Within two months we were dating and have been together ever since.

My first was SUSE followed shortly thereafter by the initial release of Fedora Core. Lots of distro hopping and tinkering later, I run LMDE these days as my daily driver and I distro hop on the other computers in my collection.

It’s my daily driver; the benefits of mint with the stability of a Debian base.

Ah, what a shame, he had some good stuff.

I’m assuming you’re talking about the YouTuber; It’s been since before the pandemic that I’ve watched AvE, what did he do?

For me it was during the development of Diablo 3 when Blizzard acted like a bunch of children over community comments/concerns about the art style/direction of the game. I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on much, honestly.

While I’m not sure the “walking sim” games are what you’re looking for, I’d add Lifeless Planet and maybe Dear Esther. Once you know what’s going on/what happened, there’s not much point in replaying.

Perhaps not as full featured as the others, but I host wiki.js for my knowledge base on my local server.

What a terrible day to have eyes.

Same, flashbacks to being in college trying to get Wi-Fi working in Fedora on my laptop and then struggling to get it to work with my uni’s new Wi-Fi system. Frustrating, but a great learning experience as you said.

Whelp, this one’s going straight into the food crimes folder; thanks for the addition!

I’m reminded of this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

I recently did that with a Debian 3 (r8 I think) disc, that whole experience was a blast from the past!

I use Roman authors, with the machine/VM’s purpose (often vaguely) linked to what the author was known for. For example, my NAS is called Tacitus (a historian), while my game server is called Plautus (a playwright). A couple services predate my schema (like my Pihole and OPNSense box) and are named descriptively.