I use a mini PC with a wireless keyboard and mouse. There are also remote controls for media PCs if you don’t want to use a keyboard and mouse.

That idle power consumption doesn’t seem right. That’s less than a Raspberry Pi.

As long as the PC isn’t being connected to the internet, there’s no reason you can’t just keep running an old kernel.

Banking can be done in person at the bank. Games and media can be pirated.

I used to run RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 1 and it was able to play most of the SNES games I tried. Of course that was with no shaders or upscaling.

Download some live boot images, use Rufus to write them to flash drives, boot them up and try them out. I would suggest starting with something like Mint or Fedora. When you find one you like, back up your data, run the installer and follow the prompts.

A lot of distros disable the functions of the magic sysrq key for security reasons. If it’s enabled, it should work as long as the system is still capable of reading keyboard inputs.

There’s also the Belling-Lee connector. It’s been around since 1922 and is still commonly used for radio and TV antennas in Europe.

One of the better free options is FreeDNS, but you are limited to 5 records.

If you want your own domain, I would suggest Porkbun. They have an API that can be used for dynamic DNS.

You shouldn’t have any issues with MakeMKV and normal blurays. 4K blurays can only be ripped with certain drives and they need custom firmware.

Gnome Disk Utility lets you manage the mount points from a GUI. There are probably other programs that can do it too.

You can use stunnel to make your VPN look like HTTPS.

Most ISPs have remote access to their modems. You should use your own if possible. If you can’t, then put it in bridge mode and connect your own router to it.

If you bought the game, all you would have to do is click install and Steam would have done all of the setup for you. If you pirate, then you have to do that work yourself. It’s not particularly difficult, but it takes more than just double clicking on an exe file.

If you have a keyboard that can run the QMK firmware, you can remap keys and run macros in the keyboard.

You could write a simple bash script that will launch it, wait for it to open, then use wmctrl to position the window wherever you want it.

There is ddccontrol and ddcutil for controlling desktop monitors. There is also the ddcci-driver which adds a device to /sys/class/backlight so you can use programs that would normally be used for controlling a laptop backlight.

My DVR and IP cameras are on a network with no internet access. My server has access to the camera network and I can connect to the server over a VPN for remote viewing. I definitely don’t trust the DVR or the IP cameras. They are constantly trying to connect to a bunch of different IP addresses, some of which are in China.

They could also use treated waste water for cooling the data centers instead of dumping it in the ocean.

OPNsense doesn’t officially support ARM. You need an x86 PC for it unless you want to mess with an experimental build.

OpenWRT does support the Raspberry Pi though. You will want the Pi 5 for that since it has PCIe to connect an ethernet card to.