That reminds me I need to dig into the technical stuff again.
I stopped running the node because it's on laptop so it runs the battery out when I forget to in plug in.
Good reminder to get back grounded to the Network
Discussion
I recommenda buying a used computer on eBay, craigalist or see if your local college campus has a property surplus store where they sell their used equipment. Dell Optiplexes are reliable and plentiful. See if you can get one with a 7th gen (or higher) Intel core i5 or i7 with 16 gigs of RAM. Shouldn't cost you more than $100. Then install a 2tb HDD or SSD (depending on your budget). A dedicated machine running Umbrel or StartOS is a great launch point.
I stopped into my local computer shop and ordered something along these lines for $150... I'm kinda excited about installing all the stuff and seeing how it works.
I recommend Umbrel or StartOS. You can download the installer software, flash it to a USB drive (with software like Belena Etcher), boot off the USB drive, run the installer (takes about 5 minutes), take the USB stick out, reboot the machine, and you are off to the races.
Is Cinnamon Mint OK substitute for StartOS?
I think I'll just do the UmbrelOS straight away. Seems to be what I want as a Google drive replacement as well.
StartOS is specifically for running a node and other servers. It is not a general distribution of Linux. If you go with Mint, you'll be manually installing, configuring and administrating the software, whereas with StartOS, it's more of an app store experience, where a lot of configuration of all the moving parts is done for you.
Ok thank you. I will def get StartOS then...