One of those tiny low power PCs with OpenSense is a good alternative, but a bit more work. The only downside is that you need a separate switch and wifi access point.

Sure, but it's still really interesting from a historic point of view.

Easiest? More like... The only way.

Is this what burnout looks like?

What I think the biggest problem with the traditional package managers is that (1) they don't isolate packages from each other (when you install a program files are placed in many random places, like /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc) and (2) you can't have multiple versions of the same package installed at the same time.

This creates a lot of work for package maintainers who need to constantly keep packages up to date as dependencies are updated.

Also, because of this, every distro is essentially an insane dependency tree where changing even one small core package could break everything.

Because of this, backwards compatibility on Linux is terrible. If you need to run an older application which depends on older packages, your only choice is to download an older distro.

This is what snap and flatpak try to solve. I think they are not great solutions, because they ended up being an extra package manager next to the traditional package managers. Until we see a distro that uses flatpak or something similar exclusively, the problem is not solved.

Take a loan, pay the guy to reverse time. Now the loan is reversed and you don't have to pay it back.

Avoid investing in things you don't understand.

It's not that bad, bios is stored on an eeprom chip that can be programmed with some special device. On some motherboards (usually older) the chip is socketed which is really nice. On others, you need to desolder it. If you can find someone doing electronic repair, they might be able to fix it.

Also renamed xml, renamed json and renamed sqlite.

Look at commercial TVs, those used by businesses. Some even come with a RPi slot.

But something I forgot to mention about old hardware is that it allows you to run old software, old games... and there's also the nostalgia of Windows XP, or Windows 98, the early web. They remind me of a simpler time...

I would say when it becomes too slow for even basic tasks like browsing the web, or running an up-to-date operating system.

Today, I would say the bar is around 3000-4000 points on cpubenchmark for the cpu, 8gb of ram and an SSD.

You could definitely get a usable computer that has less. I have a Pentium II PC that works great, and can even connect to the Internet. But software today is far more bloated and inefficient than it used to be, such an old machine would be useful only if you don't do anything computationally intensive, and don't need to run any modern software.