IT has a level of access to systems that makes management nervous. The fear is that an IT person in financial trouble could use that to embezzle, or be pressured to sell access to a malicious third party.

Common in IT roles as well.

That’s because “Dual License” means there are two licenses. Anyone can use it under the terms of the LGPL. If a company doesn’t want to abide by those terms, they can pay them not to by buying one of the commercial licenses

For a privacy friendly OS, surprised nobody has mentioned Freedombox

It’s designed explicitly for your use case, along with an easy path to other self hosted services. When you’re ready for more than it offers through the web interface, it’s a full Debian install under the hood - so you can install whatever you need to. Privacy friendly and super stable, with smooth upgrades to new releases and security updates for old versions several years after the new one is available.

As far as hardware, your old computer is probably more powerful than a Pi and can support more drives, but the Pi will be more power efficient. As others have mentioned, if you care about your data long term then backups are a must, so a separate NAS or a Pi with a large drive for backup storage is a good idea as well, whatever OS you choose.

Not true. Free cellular connections exist in some places. And there are non-cellular solutions like LoRA trackers.

Probably because one of his alts was on dbzer0 and was banned for transphobia

I can’t take credit for writing it, but here you go!

https://workaround.org/