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Google originally made a name for themselves by building a global search engine on low cost, low powered desktop machines running in parallel, so it's surprising because they have gone from high-efficiency to power hogs.

I've always relied on multiple aspects for my used drives (currently ZFS raidz2 which itself provides multiple checks, but I also do backups of the really important stuff). It doesn't matter though, all drives new or old are going to fail and you just have to be ready for it. The worst case is multiple drives failing at once, and I had that happen several times when using a weak power supply.

So far I've been really happy with the refurbs from Amazon though, plus the NAS is nothing to sneeze at. I upgraded the server to a newer machine, then realized that allowed me to step up in families for my SAS cards. Basically went from a machine that could push data at 70MB/s (and was constantly behind) to a new machine pushing 450MB/s or more with almost no lag. I run a lot of stuff on my home network so it's been nice having the new speed, and the zfs pools are providing around 92TB on one set and 22TB on another set so I have room to go crazy. If I had to buy new drives I'd have maybe half that amount of space.

Check the SMART info on the drives you receive, if they already show signs of failure then return them immediately.

For "reputable" sellers, I typically go with ones who are selling drives in bulk and have a history of more than five minutes with lots of recent good reviews. I took a chance on a good deal for a "new" drive once and received an obviously used drive where the previous person had cut out the SAS bridge (these pins are required to power on some SAS models like what I bought, so the drive was a paperweight). You'll get some lemons, but I've been running mostly used drives on my fileserver for the past twenty years and had reasonably good luck from bulk sellers (and easy replacements when I got a bad drive from one of them).

Oh, you might also check refurbs from Amazon. My current fileserver is running a set of eight 18TB refurbs which were significantly cheaper at the time, but the drive model itself was only a year old so I knew there couldn't be much wear on what I received. And Amazon has a good return policy.

Any $5 laser mouse with a scroll wheel from ebay/amazon is fine for me. Plug it in and it just works. I prefer certain shapes for comfort but I've never had a mouse NOT work in linux.

Waze has popped up ads on me plenty of times while I'm driving. Yes it knows I'm driving, the map is still scrolling along my route. At one point it was bad enough that the ads were remaining after every stop light, and finally clearing about half way to the next light. I haven't seen it happen in awhile though, maybe they finally got it fixed.

Actually I AM that guy with a small font size and super-packed density. The more information on the screen, the faster I can take it in at a glance and find what I need. Sorry your brain doesn't work that way, but less clicking and scrolling absolutely does affect my productivity and my idea of usability. For example, I find it highly annoying when a website changes to a larger spacing on a drop-down list and suddenly something I used to be able to immediately click on now requires me to scroll down several times to find the option I want. I'm not sure how that's supposed to increase usability.

Heh I just ran into the invisible icons issue recently, for whatever reason I am no longer able to accept Teams meeting. Yeah that's definitely a shitty thing. But more whitespace? In other words, less visible information on the screen which requires more scrolling or clicking to other screens? Sorry, that just sounds annoying and less productive.

What do you find "old-fashioned" about Thunderbird? Do you not consider an interface "new" if they don't change it and hide all the common features every five minutes like Microsoft does? It's an email client, you read your emails in it. How would you do it better?

Kinda like dealing with Microsoft Office... You can't find anything in that "new" toolbar design because so many options are grouped together in ways that don't make any sense. I'm so glad I never had to actually use that garbage even though I did enjoy the older versions.

It's been a long time since I used Windows myself, however one of the big reasons for switching was the inherent instability. At once point I was developing code in Visual Studio and constantly loading/closing quite a few different programs to test things out. Windows just didn't seem to handle memory-recovery and I would have to reboot every week or two (usually because of the whole OS locking up). In comparison, I run a variety of software on my linux machines which can involve anything from testing code in multiple browsers to image editing to 3D CAD drawings. Sure that tends to drain the memory but when I close something I get that memory back. I'll frequently get down to the last 100K of RAM, close a couple programs that may be holding large caches (Firefox really hates me having hundreds of open tabs), and then I'm right back up and running again. Reboots may occur about every 6 months.

I have to support other people using Windows at work, which reminds me how much I'll never go back to it. My biggest frustration is that Microsoft is constantly changing things. Hell you can't even directly reach the control panel any more, you have to run searches to find the specific item you want. Want to check the settings of a certain printer? Good luck, that doesn't seem to be available in the right-click menu any more. It's just all these idiotic changes making it difficult to actually use or maintain Windows. Why should I have to google how to find something when everything used to be under the control panel or a right-click away?

It may not be a hazard in your area, but around here there's about a million bicyclists who have no objection to riding out into the middle of the road in front of fast-moving traffic to go around parked vehicles. Also that parked vehicle could be someone changing a flat tire and walking around their vehicle, or present some other type of hazard. You don't know why they are parked there, and if you're driving at night you might not even see them until it's too late. Obviously other people in your area want to know about these parked cars or they wouldn't be reporting them.

If you want less information, why not switch to Google maps or OsmAnd?