TT-RSS install on my cloud server, web browser and android clients. Use it for everything I can. It vastly simplifies keeping up with news/ events/authors/sites I want to follow without having to visit dozens of sites daily. I've over 100 feeds I track, not counting the YouTube channels. On some I find articles to read daily, some weekly, some rarely. For example, I followed a link in my Slashdot feed to this story. I'd not have seen it if it wasn't in my feed.

Really? Now that would be an achievement.
Between the AI crud that's remarkably inaccurate and the litany of sponsored links, it's hard to get Google to return results of value anymore.
Perplexity (mentioned in systemd-anonymousd' comment) is one good alternative. Here's another (IMHO):
https://www.startpage.com/
Useful Google results without the crud.

LOL!
Oh, to have mod points...

...that the decline in productivity and the forced return to work in office environments are somehow related?

Same progression here, though I was a bit older.

Started with Trash-80s in High School. Networked off of a cassette tape player. Finally got my own IIe when I was a Senior and the school switched to them. The IIe carried me through college, until I was able to get a blistering fast 286 once I had a real job & income. How far we've come.

Actually, I have.

I made a group of friends there years ago, some of whom I'm still in touch with, albeit via other means now. Those forums, and some of the friends we had there came up in conversation just the other day.

Hmmm. Perhaps I'll go see if I can dig up an old copy of OzWin and see if it still works. I might even have some of the old forum message threads around...

Now I have to go find another distro to move to. I have multiple computers with multiple users, all running Mint/KDE. I thought I'd finally found a easy to use, Debian based distro with KDE. I tried Kubuntu a couple of times, and it was very clearly a second class citizen, even to the point where it almost imploded in Oct 2015. Unless it has improved very dramatically in both quality, focus, and stability it's not a viable alternative.

Sigh. Fine. Back to the drawing board.
Dammit.

More Chrome or Chromium profiles until some of the add-ins catch up. Without AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and HTTPS Everywhere the web is nearly unusable. Without TabMixPlus and Xmarks, it's a lot less convenient.

...so yes, I do. And it continues to annoy me when I find websites that don't support RSS or Atom. It's not that hard.

Not all are like that. My X5 is, but my wife's Maxima is far smarter. The fob is basically a proximity device. I can walk up to the locked car with the fob in my pocket, push a button on the door and it unlocks. I then get in, put my foot on the brake, tap the start button, and it starts. I never even have to get the fob out of my pocket. Want accessories without starting the car? Don't step on the brake, and tap the start button. Easy.

I can't remember how long I've been a Geeks customer - years. I've bought laptops, CPUs, memory, and miscellaneous hardware from them over the years. They were always a great place to check when you needed an older or oddball piece of hardware - often times they had it. Great service, great people.

You will be missed.

I use tt-rss. It runs on my web server so i't always on, has mobile interfaces, runs in any browser. Try it.

http://tt-rss.org/

Security Theater

Motto: "Wasting billions making millions feel not one bit safer"

Largely on the kind of testing you are going to be doing. For functional software testing, one big box hosting VMs is great. I do it with ESXi, a quad core, 8gb, and several disks. good enough for a virtualized server and a couple of workstations. If that's your target, then more spindles is better. 4 250gb hard drives give better performance than a 1TB drive, because there is no contention for disk access (if you set it up right).

Third this. Been a happy Linode customer for years. Their smallest system runs my website and VPN just fine. I can even back up to it -after simply attaching some S3 storage.