Left screen is me bullying an AI in a themed terminal. Just for fun. Virtual midi keyboard (glad you asked) is yoshimi, which assigns the keys automatically to your keyboard. I was actually playing along to some music [playing in cmus] using a 25 key midi sampler. The virtual keyboard shows me which key is being pressed [a blue dot appears on the relevant key]
https://yoshimi.github.io/docs/user-guide/starting/starting.html You know what, install yoshimi and use it. It’s great fun.

Yes and no. Use case is the great definer here. This machine has been, and still is, many things; NAS, router, media server, server server, karaoke machine. Hell I even fell for that Chia Coin bingo card bullshit for about a month years back, and pressed it into service to ‘farm’ that with a big old ugly Noctua cooler sticking out of the open case.
Actually that’s a good example bc doing that shit fried the RAM and if I had been using a laptop with so-dimm and soldered it would have likely grilled the whole board.
At the moment it’s set up on a work bench desk in a corner of the drawing room where everyone in the household can finger fuck the screens if they wish and I don’t have to worry about it . When kids ask if they can play games on it they either get gzdoom or mame or sent away disappointed.
Also it is silent. I love silent computers.

I know plenty of people who don’t even use their laptop much because they’re doing everything on their phones or game consoles.

Thank you but no.

Well, I do have other computers that are much better suited for it. One of them even has its own room, laid out specifically for that purpose ;). But that’s a different post for a different sub, maybe.

Thank you. I like CRT (even if it has its quirks) but always struggled to find a use for it. Then I realised its great with an older monitor and a dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks LLM. It’s like arguing with the bomb from the film Darkstar.