What is typically done, e.g. buying a PinePhone with PostMarketOS or refurbished setup deGoogled Murena phone, is having a default user with a well known password, e.g. 123456. AFAIR when you setup Rasbian you do have an interface to have a default user with a password.
I personally made an ISO of a configured distribution, see https://fabien.benetou.fr/Cookbook/Electronics#SocialWebXRRPi0 and that worked quite well for my use case.
Well you could do that but honestly a NAS is “just” yet another computer with a specific form factor. So … do buy one if you want to but nothing is preventing you from grabbing whatever hardware you have around, e.g. old laptop, unused SBC like a Raspberry Pi, desktop gathering dust, put Docker or Podman on it, get going. If you want access from the outside you can use TailScale (easiest to setup), WireGuard indeed or OpenVPN.
Yes IMHO having your own data on your own NAS where you entirely control access (e.g. LAN only, no VPN even unless you go on holiday) is the safest and most reliable.
kSuite. (I left Proton cause of the lack of webdav, caldav, carddav)
Interesting, I’ll check that because indeed for now the support is not non-existent yet still not good enough IMHO.
I wish there was a budget for every company and government to pay retirees part time to go back over their oldest code that’s still in use. A lot of retired programmers would do it for fun and nostalgia.
There is no budget for it AFAICT but there is https://github.com/abandonware and others trying to help on that path.
… so they all look quite promising.
Check ProtonDB, e.g. https://www.protondb.com/search?q=Civilization and that, even though very useful initially started for the SteamDeck it is also a very reliable source to know if a game will work well on Linux. Overall the vast VAST majority of games do work unless there is a kernel level anti-cheat which is mostly for competitive online games only.
Now in terms of performances, get the GPU you can afford but overall its comparable with other OSes (not to name them) and sometimes even better, so on average, you can trust whatever the publisher is recommending.
Source : been gaming on Linux, in VR and on “flat” 3D for years now, pretty much daily.
It is not. It is hard only if you are lazy, sorry to be so blunt.
Amazon works because they are :
So… as others said here, nearly anything else is better. I left Amazon years ago and basically now my preference is :
So… this is actually both easy and convenient because each time it becomes easier. You get to know the owners of the local shop, you get to have accounts on the different online websites. You get to actually talk to actual humans, even from online shops. Last example being buying RollerBlades from a Danish shop and nearly 1 year later, a screw went loose so they shipped me for free a replacement just because I explain the problem via email directly to them.
In the end I’m happier since. I felt like I’m contributing to a better neighborhood and I’m more mindful about my choices. This is even more the case since Trumps tariffs.
I bet you can find stuff on AliExpress for a lot less but then you have to insure support is descent.