Are we really so far down the "cloud" rabbit hole that owning computer hardware is this perplexing? Many things you'd want to experiment with can be best done a

Are we really so far down the "cloud" rabbit hole that owning computer hardware is this perplexing? Many things you'd want to experiment with can be best done at home (home automation, media servers, SDR, etc), and I'd rather do this and run VMs for everything than have a rat's nest of RPi cables for every home-based project.