delendum

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 that is by now almost 10 years old, it runs perfectly on Linux and is a fantastic choice even today. It’s built like a tank and that Intel i5 powering it is immortal. DDR3 RAM is dirt cheap now and it takes up to 16Gb, you can swap its HDD to a SATA SSD (if not done already) and batteries for it are still cheap and plentiful.

If you’re looking for something affordable for software dev, I can’t think of a better choice for $200-$300

https://www.lenovo.com/lt/lt/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t430/

They really built this one right, they don’t make them like this anymore.

Have you thought of self-hosting mailcow? https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

It’s very easy to set up and fairly straightforward to maintain, if you have a static IP and it’s not impossible to get a PTR record then I highly recommend it. Yes you’re self hosting your own mail server but mailcow vastly simplifies this.

Alternatively plonking it on the right VPS can also work.

I have a Pine phone that I bought some time ago.

I tried a couple of distros/environments:

• Mobian
• Manjaro + Plasma Mobile
• Manjaro + Phosh

My experience: As a basic phone, it mostly works. Everything else is pretty bad. The Pine phone is underpowered, the environments are not very well optimised and polished, basic browsing was almost unusable, things didn’t work properly, I had to use the CLI to get around UI issues (which is very sucky on a phone), etc. Battery life is bad, the camera is a joke (if it works), the screen has dead pixels after less than a year, it’s not a great picture.

I fully support what Pine phone is trying to do, in fact I bought 2 of them and I don’t regret buying them, but know what you are getting into. It’s nowhere near ready for mass adoption. If you’re a hobbyist then it’s a fun toy to play around with.

Purism is more expensive/better hardware and uses the Phosh graphical shell. I haven’t tried it but I imagine the experience is a lot more polished. You could probably use that as a daily driver if you were happy to give up most of the apps / quality of life stuff your spyware phone currently does for you.

If you’re not, then going the degoogled route is probably your best choice.

My 2 cents:

Simple, no domain required stuff:

• Pi-hole for self-hosted DNS: https://pi-hole.net/
• Navidrome for self-hosted music server: https://www.navidrome.org/ (best to pair this with an external portable HDD/SSD for music storage)
• Set up syncthing on it and use it for automatic file back-up: https://syncthing.net/ (that external HDD/SSD will come in handy again).

More advanced, should pair with a domain:

• Nextcloud for your own personal cloud/calendar/etc: https://nextcloud.com/ - it won’t be blazing fast but it will work well, I had it running on a pi for a while.
• Simple web hosting - the pi is great for hosting low traffic stuff like blogs etc.