In the long run a PC will probably more expensive though, because it uses more electricity than a specialized embedded device. A specialized router is probably worth it if you stick with it for a while, at 10G there is little reason to upgrade.
Yeah it’s a huge source of problems. If you are outside the US your IPv6 prefix is never gonna be correct in every GeoIP database, even if you send a request to have it corrected, so you sometimes get geoblocked and other sites just block you because it sometimes gets classified as VPN.
I tried various linux distros like ubuntu as a kid, but because of gaming I didn’t switch at that time, then around 2010 I got a home server and installed Arch on it. When Arch switched to systemd I switched to gentoo because I did not want systemd. In 2014 I switched to gentoo Linux on my desktop, but still had dual boot for gaming on windows. I tried various init systems on gentoo and then ended up using systemd anyways. Because I got sick of waiting for packages to compile I switched back to arch on my desktop. On my home server and laptop I used alpine linux for a while. I switched back to arch shortly after because I had too many issues with alpine on desktop. I still use alpine in VMs on the server, but others that I don’t touch as much like the print server run rocky linux. I also tried GPU-passthrough to game in a windows VM, but I never managed to resolve all the issues. Since nowadays most games run on wine and proton I never bothered reinstalling/fixing windows when it stopped booting a few years ago, so now I use linux only.
Well, that is just not true anymore and hasn’t been in a very long time. Probably everything made in the last 20 years has auto detection and doesn’t need a crossover ethernet cable. This was introduced as an optional feature sometime in the 100Base-T era and is required for gigabit ethernet.
I try to use FOSS as much as possible, but I am not willing to give up video games, so I do have steam installed. I also need discord for communication with friends I am playing with. I only use these two on my desktop computer. On my laptop I don’t have any proprietary software running in userspace, but of course it still has proprietary firmware blobs and proprietary UEFI firmware. I also have an old Thinkpad X220 running coreboot and with ME disabled (HAP bit set, ME technically still runs, but halts after hardware initialization) and unnecessary ME components stripped using me_cleaner. And my home server also runs coreboot with ME “disabled” and stripped but it has a BMC with proprietary supermicro firmware and an LSI HBA that also requires firmware.