Damn, sorry to hear that, my experience with the 480 was really good. Admittedly AMD wasn’t quite caught up yet with hardware video encoding at the time that card was designed (basically a reskinned 480). Specifically, hardware video encoding has gotten drastically better since then on AMD cards.

I worked in a print store and brother those huge xerox machines are no joke. Tens of thousands of pages with minimal maintenance and downtime. Consumer printers are often terrible, especially inkjets, but this just seems like you’ve never used a nice one before. The problem is most people would rather pay 50 dollars for a really terrible printer to print with it 20 times rather than just order 20 prints from a shop or cough up a couple hundred for a really well made printer, laser or no.

ALVR works great, assuming SteamVR in general works with your DE (no Gnome support atm but KDE works for sure).

That display out will be hard to match with an old optiplex or laptop, but I agree, the pricing is getting less absurdly low and more just moderately low.

Since you mentioned darktable I assume you already know this, but depending on the camera’s raws and the presets that imagemagick has for converting these photos the results might be undesirable if not inspected or tweaked. Not disparaging any advice given here, just mentioning that generally raws are edited on a case by case basis to fix camera artifacts and color issues. Hope the solutions others have posted work out for you!

There are different reasons to support alternative browsers. While Firefox on IOS definitely does ad and tracker blocking (which is great!) Some people are concerned that the underlying engine is restricted on IOS to webkit. So it may very well be a better experience for you than safari, but that alone does not satisfy concerns of homogenization in the browser space on Apple devices.