A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one!

In fairness, games are still something I’m willing to pay for and books. I think probably because Kindle and Steam are better user experiences than pirating those.

I used to have a moral objection to piracy, I thought that if a piece of media is good enough that I enjoy it then the people that made it deserve to be paid for their work.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that even if I do pay for something there is no guarantee that the people that worked on it will get their fair share and paying for media is increasingly a worse user experience than piracy.

“Nextcloud is a can of worms” is an understatement. I keep talking myself into and out of trying to install it. I just don’t have the time at the moment to troubleshoot it when something inevitably breaks.

Yes. Not taking into account anything except the output of the laser verses the output of the reaction.

I’m doing basically all the things you’ve just listed using a Dell Precision Tower 3620 you don’t necessarily need new hardware for it and could save quite a lot if there are used workstations in your area.

For software I’m using esxi with truenas core virtualized and photonos as my docker host with everything managed through portainer. I would not suggest using esxi unless you want to learn about it, I wish I’d gone with Proxmox at the start.