Veraxis

Every few days on the machines I use daily, but I have a couple spare laptops which I only use infrequently, and I usually don't run into any major problems when I have to make a big set of updates on a machine I am using for the first time in a few months.

Hmm, not sure then. It might be called something different. But I do know exactly the thing you mean from having it on my work computers, and I find it very annoying, too.

I believe some Dells have a bios setting for dynamic brightness which can be turned off.

I am a big fan of Zero Japan's teapots. Glazed ceramic, and i have put them in the dishwasher for years with no issues. I think they also go by the name Bee House. The infuser they come with is pretty good, but it turns our that the mouth is also the perfect size for a Finum medium basket strainer.

Gesundheit

Detecting and setting up printers

I love gyokuro. Definitely not a tea I would want to drink every day (both for taste and price reasons), but for special occasions it is great.

For system files/configuration on my machines, timeshift set to run once a week.

For family photos and shared files, I built a pair of SFTP servers made from old HP thin-client PCs at two different geographic locations which automatically sync to each other once a day via cron job using vsftpd and lftp. Each one has both an NVMe and SATA SSD which run in a software RAID 1 configuration.

For any other files, a second local server also using vsftpd and two SSDs in USB enclosures. I manually back them up using rsync on an irregular basis.

No problem! Yeah, as long as you have the space, I think this would be a good way to repurpose an old junker PC. I imagine a quick search of something along the lines of "how to configure a samba server" should bring up some decent tutorials.

I use an older HP thin client PC with a 4TB solid state drive as an SFTP file server using vsftpd, but if you are local only then an SMB server using samba would probably be fine. I use SFTP because I wanted something a bit more secure which I can port-forward with my router on a random higher-numbered port for remote access.

I mostly taught myself how to do this by looking at guides originally meant for the raspberry pi, but there is nothing different about running these same programs on Debian or the like. Personally, I would not recommend a raspbery pi for a large file server, as they do not natively support SSDs without additional hardware which will make the price significantly higher and less self-contained than a used, older-gen thin-client PC which can be had for relatively low cost on places like ebay (though they do make some fairly high capacity micro SD cards these days).

Hardware-wise, generally these types of servers are not CPU intensive, nor do they require any particularly high amount of RAM, so an older-gen or lower power CPU can often work fine, but you should probably make sure to get something with at least gigabit ethernet speeds, as a 100Mbit connection on, say, a raspberry pi 3 or older will be very slow for transferring large files.

I would say a used Dell or HP business laptop would be a safe bet. Most business laptops have decent keyboards, replacement batteries will be relatively easy to find, and user-serviceable RAM is the norm. Given the not especially high processing power needs, probably the middle-specced ones with a few gens-old i5 will be dirt cheap and work fine for your needs.

I mostly learned from some of the terminal customization which came stock with Manjaro when I was first learning Linux. So when I made the jump to Arch, I customized my terminal with fsh with the powerlevel10k theme and text highlighting. I also modified some of the default text colors to a green color to evoke green phosphor CRT terminals.