I’m in a similar boat. I use old computers for spare parts and hobby projects (e.g. I did Linux From Scratch on an old second-hand Thinkpad I picked up on a whim). I think cheap second hand computers are great for tinkerers e.g. you can flash custom firmware without worrying about bricking the mobo.

You could also use them as servers if you have any services you want to host.

Also if you truly have no use for them, fix them up, install something like Linux Mint on them, and give them away.

Yeah that’s fair. nheko is themable with qt themes though; I have it set to use my system qt theme. But I agree the UI gets a bit clunky. I think I just picked nheko cause it seemed the most feature complete when I looked, but I’ve just been using it since then so maybe the meta has changed.

I find Matrix janky but still usable. What homeserver implementation and what client are you using? I use tuwunel and nheko. tuwunel works great for me and I think it’s probably a disservice to the Matrix protocol that the “canonical” homeserver implementation is written in Python. Nheko is somewhat janky for me but I like it more than Element, and I think most of the jankiness is because of the Matrix protocol rather than the client implementation.

I use self-hosted Jitsi for screen share, although this is just video conference software without the IM aspect of Discord. (Jitsi does have IM to be clear, but it’s a chat tied to a particular meeting, not like a persistent groupchat.) You could just use Signal chats as you have already been doing and send Jitsi links when you want to call. Jitsi has E2EE although I’m not up to date on the details of how it works.

Why do you like Arch? If you want the minimalism but you don’t want to compile everything yourself, I’d recommend Void Linux. It’s a lovely little distro; I only don’t daily drive it because of less package availability than Arch+AUR, and I couldn’t be bothered to package so many things myself. But I don’t remember their servers ever being down when I used it.

I’d probably recommend LFS over Gentoo for that—you do more “yourself” and I found the LFS instructions easier to follow than the Gentoo install guide. And I’d say I learned more about Linux from LFS than from installing Gentoo. But LFS was done over about a month or so for me (not nonstop ofc, just in my free time) whereas Gentoo was 1 or 2 days.

Guest Wi-Fi is common for that reason. I’ve got guest Wi-Fi set up so that guests can access the internet but they can’t access my LAN.

Nushell looks cool but I prefer to stick with the POSIXes so that I know my scripts will always work and syntax always does what I expect it to. I use zsh as a daily driver, and put up with various bashes, ashes, dashes, that come pre-installed with systems I won’t be using loads (e.g. temporary vms).