The clock is only useful if the time is correct. They could at least put a small super capacitor in there to keep the time during short power outages.

I wish they didn’t even have clocks. The darn thing resets every time there’s a big gust of wind.

Gaming on Linux has been really good for the last several years. The main issue is certain multiplayer games that intentionally block Linux users.

Nobara and Bazzite are gaming focused distributions, but they are both based on Fedora. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed will give you the lastest kernel version if you want a rolling release distro.

Mint has a software manager and you can also install Synaptic.

Gaming on Mint works fine, but it’s based on Ubuntu LTS releases, so you won’t have the latest kernel or mesa versions. If you’re using an RX 9000 series GPU, you should probably pick a distro with a newer kernel and mesa version to get the best performance.

It’s good for basic things like cutting, merging and transitions. It can be used to blur something as long as it’s not moving.

That would be nice for CAD work, but it would have to be an actual PC monitor, not a TV. 42 inch would be just about right for my desk. The only ones I’ve seen are 32 inch, which is too small to replace four monitors.

It still works in Firefox if you switch to the desktop site. You can also use uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock with it to get rid of the ads.

Rockbox supports modern codecs including Opus, so you can fit nearly 4 days of decent quality music on a 4GB iPod.

There’s always KolibriOS. It’s small enough to run from a single floppy disk.

CCA cables break if they are moved a lot. I’ve had trouble with CCA ethernet cables breaking.

It’s an ultralight. You don’t need a pilots license to fly one in the US. You can even build one yourself if you want to. You don’t even need any inspection or airworthiness certificate. Since they can’t legally be flown over populated areas, it’s unlikely for anyone except the pilot to get injured or killed.

I’ve got some games that are choppy with mitigations on, but they run smooth with mitigations off. I do temporarily disable the mitigations when playing those games, it’s just inconvenient since it requires a reboot.

IMAX film is equivalent to 12K. Their digital laser projectors are only 4K.

I’m still running a 1950x in my desktop. It works fine for most stuff, but the gaming performance is a bit low now with all of the spectre mitigations. I was planning on upgrading, but that will have to wait a few more years now.

I ran my previous laptop from 2012 until it died last year. I used it as my electronics workbench PC for several years because the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, but it still worked fine for running KiCAD and programming microcontrollers. I replaced it with a used Thinkcentre that I got dirt cheap on ebay just before the RAM prices went crazy.

Wine has support serial and parallel ports. They work fine. In recent versions of wine you don’t even have to set anything up. Just run ls -l ~/.wine/dosdevices/com* after running something in wine to see what the com port number is for your device. The ttyACM and ttyUSB ports are USB serial ports. The ttyS ports are hardware serial ports and they will probably show up even if your computer doesn’t have any.

MeshCore runs at 2.73 kbps and it can send a short text message in a fraction of a second. The short turbo preset on Meshtastic is 21.88 kbps, but that’s still too slow for images. The higher speed reduces the range by quite a bit too.

For images, you would be better off using WiFi HaLow, which runs several mbps on 900 MHz.

If you have a ham license, there is HamWAN and ARDEN as well. They are fast enough to stream live video. They can work over long distances, but the high gain antennas have to be aimed carefully.

It’s not going to make a very good NAS. It looks like it only has USB 2 and 100M ethernet. That’s going to be slower than the NAS I built with the Pentium 4 desktop I got for free in 2007.

The list of vulnerability mitigations for those old CPUs is going to be a mile long. They will probably have their performance cut in half or worse. Even a much newer CPU like Zen 1 takes a big performance hit.

You can disable mitigations, but then a malicious website could potentially steal sensitive information on that computer.

For home use, all I can think of is wireless video. 15 GB/s is faster than the fastest DisplayPort or HDMI versions. It could handle any resolution and refresh rate currently in use without any compression. That would be useful for VR headsets since they need low latency.