Yeah but there are too many brands out there to choose from; as a consumer our only power is to speak with our wallets.

Corporations don’t get to pick and choose which actions from them result in lower sales; all of their actions are judged, and by all potential customers.

Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.

It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.

If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.

Nothing too crazy. I use Proxmox on hardware that used to be a gaming rig (4th gen Intel) and I upped the RAM to 32GB.

• Plex
• Home Assistant
• NextCloud
• VM to host Duplicati + Samba which backs up some shared storage.
• VM that contains the extremely specific build environment for one of my mechanical keyboards
• VM that contains my ESP Home environment.
• VM for Docker based web development because as good as WSL is, it still sucks sometimes.

Some of my “VMs” are actually LXCs but I can’t remember which are which at the moment.

Playing with ZFS was fun too, and it puts all that RAM to good use!

I’ve also been meaning to create a VM for Dokku, but I haven’t had a strong enough need yet.