Another teacher here, I picked up an interest in computing in general from my dad when I was young (got my start on an old C64). As I grew up we both discovered Linux and it’s been a slow burn ever since. My first self-hosted service was Emby and a simple file server, followed by a personal Moodle instance. I eventually moved to Proxmox for hosting my services and have steadily expanded my list as I become ever more dismayed by cloud hosted services and subscriptions.

As someone whose family is from Altoona, let me say that the abomination that is that pizza is not widely available in the city (a number of people in my family didn’t even know of it’s existence until the last decade or so) and most locals find it as baffling and disgusting as the rest of us. I’m also unsurprised that someone there would rat him out in hope of a reward, that city is the corpse of what it used to be, now stuffed to bursting with low-wage retail and healthcare jobs. It’s also a conservative bastion, go figure.

While I know you’re being funny, for those unaware, the snakes being referred to with St Patrick were a euphemism for the non-Christian beliefs in Ireland.

On the hardware from the early '00s in my collection I’ve had good results from AntiX and Q4OS.

Same, flashbacks to being in college trying to get Wi-Fi working in Fedora on my laptop and then struggling to get it to work with my uni’s new Wi-Fi system. Frustrating, but a great learning experience as you said.