I actually tried it before for my TV PC that I wanted to also use as a miniserver, with gpu pass through and everything. It was painful to get it working properly, was like 30-40% slower. I also had constant problems with USB peripherals not connecting properly, or going in a sleep state and not waking. Many games didn’t work properly.
Then I decided to just buy a cheap second second hand PC and never looked back.
Did it work? There’s a huge chance of data corruption if you are copying the disk of a running system.
Or maybe an automated system flagged it and an underpaid and overworked employee in a third world country reviewed it.
I don’t think this was malicious, these app reviews are being done by an overworked and underpaid employee in some third world country. Mistakes are made all the time.
Lights. 15 years ago, everyone was using incandescent bulbs which were terribly inefficient and neon lights which had their own inconveniences. Today, LEDs have mostly replaced them, can produce better quality light, and use a fraction of the power.
Displays. Even the cheap TVs and monitors look incredibly good.
I’ve read a lot of reviews before buying, and that was my expectation as well. I had a Nexus 5 before and it was a great phone.
Maybe I got a lemon that had some hardware fault, I don’t know. I’ve been wanting to get a newer Pixel just for GrapheneOS, but that experience was so bad, I’m having a lot of doubts
Pixel 3A. Constant bugs, camera would stop working or had a long delay starting up, system would randomly stop responding, constant crashes, lock screen would bug out preventing you from unlocking the phone. Dialer would bug out preventing you from answering the phone. Random reboots. Screen scratched really easily.
Phone crapped out about a month before warranty expired, wouldn’t boot any more. Luckily, it was still in warranty and they returned the full price.
The worst most unreliable phone I ever owned.
Make a plan. Think about how much storage you need, whether you need redundancy and backups, and what server applications you need to run.
Here you also need to consider how much time you want to spend on maintenance. Premade solutions like Synology are set and forget. Using NAS operating systems mean having to do regular updates. Using just Linux is also an option if you want full control and are confortabile with the command line, but it’s more work.
Then step 2 is getting the hardware.
My recommended route, if you want to spend the least amount of money, is to get a 2nd hand PC, preferably not pre-built (dells and hps have proprietary parts like power supplies). A 4 core cpu from the last 10 years should be fine, and 16gb of RAM is more than enough for most applications. SFFs or MiniPCs might be ok for nvme SSDs only, but if you want hard drives, get one that has enough HDD bays. Depending on what you find, you might need to replace a few things, like the power supply or case.
Servers are good and reliable and have nice features, like network management, redundant NICs, redundant power supplies, but are usually pretty noisy.
You end up stranded on a foreign planet. You need to build a rocket so you can go home, but unfortunately you have to build a whole manufacturing facility to do that. As if this wasn’t hard enough, the inhabitants of the planet are environmentalist assholes and will do anything in their power to stop you.
Alphabet needs to be broken up, same as Microsoft and Apple and Amazon. The consolidation of tech into a few giant corporations that have a tremendous amount of power and hold a monopoly/duopoly is doing a lot of harm.
Even basic stuff like operating systems (especially Windows and Android), chatting software, music playback software etc has gotten so terrible. Microsoft constantly adds unnecessary and intrusive features to Windows, Teams needs a supercomputer to perform decently, and every app is now a poorly optimized electron app that tracks everything you do.