My model, and I believe all other, have a 4pin molex connector for the power and as many sata ports as the rack can handle (in my case 4). My "mobile rack" came with 4 rather long sata cables (about 30cm) so it was easy to fit them through an empty pcie bracket slot and I just had to buy a somewhat long 4pin molex adapter.

The drives are practically internal, they are just located outside of the case in said "mobile rack".

It may be a bit minimal for your taste, but I wholeheartedly recommend Alpine. I'm currently running AdGuard and opentracker on a RaspberryPi 1B with Alpine edge, and the experience has been rock solid.

I have the exact same model sending me birthday reminders daily. Scraped all my facebook friends’ birthdays years ago and made a very basic telegram bot. Saved me more than one embarrassing moments, including today, as I completely forgot about my brother’s birthday.

I'm mainly using Budgie lately, and its quite fast, even on older hardware. I would say it feels faster than cinnamon (and much more pleasant to work with imo), but unfortunately it's very unstable.

Running with rifles is so good, yet so underrated. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I'm not Stallman. I make some exceptions and Boost has been one if them.

I'm sorry for the stupid question, but I looked at both the websites of Rocky and Alma, and still cant quite figure out what does "Enterprise grade" distro mean.

They talk about stability, but Debian is stable too, yet it's not "enterprise".

Can anyone ELI5?

While you're absolutely correct, in my personal experience Manjaro has been perfectly stable even with somewhat heavy use of the AUR.

Exactly. Mate tried emulating this behaviour, but it wasn't very successful.

As far as I know Ubuntu had to patch a lot of packages to make it work properly. I guess no one has the manpower to do that for such a niche feature.

You can do plenty with any old paperweight. The difficult part is thinking if what you need it to do and if that thing is worth the higher electricity usage of older tech.

Sadly I'm in the same boat. I've been trying to switch to Matrix, but telegram is so much better in terms of features. I really miss the shared media and links functionality.

Years ago I selfhosted Nextcloud and found this interaction just as clunky as using google drive. Now I'm just using SFTP which has much less overhead and it integrates beautifully with just about any file manager on Linux. Then again, using it on windows is a pain as far as I know.