A hard power off when the drives are mounted still isn't a good idea. Just turn it off during post or when the grub menu is shown.

I just add my CA to my devices and use self signed certificates for stuff on my LAN. I don't want to go through all the trouble of using lets encrypt for something that's not accessible from the internet.

Boeing could supply virtual floppy drives that take USB drives or SD cards if they wanted to. I'm sure they don't want to spend the money getting one certified until they are forced to though.

Floppy disks will continue working fine until the supply of new old stock disks runs out or becomes unreliable.

I would suggest getting a router that runs OpenWRT or OPNsense. That will let you configure anything you need to. It's open source firmware so it will respect your privacy.

If you go with OPNsense, you will need separate access points since it runs on a PC. The Unifi access points work well for that.

I wouldn't get one unless it was dirt cheap. The CPU wasn't that great when it was new, now an ARM SBC will outperform it using a fraction of the power.

I swapped the boot drive from a 1st gen i7 machine to a threadripper machine and it worked without any issues. I was using the default kernel on Linux Mint.

If you have any temperature monitoring or custom fan control stuff, you will need to reconfigure it though.

The real reason is that ULA and BO know they can't compete, so they are doing everything they can to slow Starship down.

Anything I add to fstab gets mounted in /mnt and removable drives get auto mounted to /media. Linux doesn't care where you mount your drives, they can be mounted anywhere you want.

I put /var/lib/flatpak in a separate btrfs subvolume. Timeshift only takes a snapshot of the root and home subvolumes.

I use it all the time without any VPN and haven't had any issues. I watch almost all youtube videos in MPV, which uses yt-dlp to get the video. I download any video I may want to watch again later to my server.

I always use yt-dlp do download youtube videos. It doesn't require installation, you just download and run it.

This is why you don't buy any hardware that requires "the cloud" to function with no option to self host. At least they are giving refunds this time, but that's usually not the case.