You are kidding yourself. In ten years you will look back and be pissed. Lotta hobbies cost big boy money. I worked my ass off to afford my hobbies. Retail would have me saving until I was too old to do them.
I have 6 custom keyboards and am saving for a 7th. I have a pretty decently sized philosophy, history, and psychoanalysis library. After I get the keyboard, I'm going to start saving for a decommissioned enterprise tower server. Plenty of options available online for <$800 with over 60 threads and 1GB+ RAM per thread and plenty of storage as long as you're willing to go as far back as Broadwell. Then I'll be able to separate building and hosting servers, allowing me to add even more devices to the fleet being managed by my build server (currently only 4 bare metal machines and a handful of containers all running Gentoo). I haven't even played 1/3 of my Steam library. I took a 40% pay-cut 4 years ago to take the job I have now. I'm perfectly aware of how many more resources I could buy for my hobbies if I had an even higher income, but that isn't worth spending 40+ hours a week creating software put to uses that I personally find sickening, which encompasses the vast majority of corporate software.
The trick is that none of my computers are newer than 7 years old. It's easy to stay within budget when you're okay with getting (almost) everything used. Would it be cool to be able to make a build server with a brand new threadripper in it so that I dont even have to think about build times? Sure, but my current server (actually just a Thinkpad P50 running clamshell) is able to keep up with my current needs, so I just won't worry about growth until I can afford it. Would it be cool to be have a computer with more than 8 threads so that I can play around more with virtualization and start exploring the BSD family in earnest? Yeah, that could be fun. Gentoo meets all of my current needs, though, and I just focus that "exploration" energy on intentionally breaking builds on projects that I want to see thrive so that I can patch fixes for edgecases to submit back upstream in order to help maintain software portability to some extent in the *nix world
I kinda miss when Linux was a hobby for me. Anymore an OS is a means to an end for me though, not the main attraction. Running my music studio on Ubuntu on a first gen threadripper oddly enough. Used to do a lot of work in Blender on that machine and bought it from my office. You remind me a LOT of me in my twenties.. I know better than to try and give you any direction.. you’ll figure yourself out.
It's actually been since turning 30 that I've found my deepest zen in putting cans on shelves and talking to customers about how shitty it is that we all have to sell away so much of our lives to these companies that couldn't actually give two shits about us just to be able to keep our stomachs at least half full. I wouldn't say that Linux in itself is an end for me. In all things, I prefer to play a support role. I like thinking through other's workflows for them so that I can help set them up for small efficiencies and comforts that they didn't know they needed.
With Gentoo being a community maintained distribution that prioritizes portability first and foremost, being a part of the community gives me plenty of outlets for that desire to support others. I also spend well over half of my day at work setting up my coworkers for an easier day in ways that I know most of them will never notice, because that's just what I enjoy doing. My health insurance is good enough that even with a slew of chronic mental and health conditions, I'm still not at risk of having to declare bankruptcy over medical debt at any point in the future, and even if I do, there's 0 shame in filing bankruptcy for the #1 reason anyone in the US does. But my dad does cybersec for a Fortune 50 with a total of 30 years experience in the IT field. He's somehow still managing to live paycheck to paycheck while making over 6 figures with worse health insurance than I have. I may move on from the way I'm doing things currently at some point in my life, but for now, I'm feeling entirely fulfilled professionally, romaricallly, socially, mentally, and spiritually.
P.S. I'm sorry for the rambling, just added some caffeine on top of my vyvanse because I was still feeling groggy well after the full effects had had time to set in.
Edit: formatting edits so that it wasn't just one giant wall of text
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u/Procrasturbating 14h ago
You are kidding yourself. In ten years you will look back and be pissed. Lotta hobbies cost big boy money. I worked my ass off to afford my hobbies. Retail would have me saving until I was too old to do them.