My setup is smaller, but when my venerable old router died about a year ago, I acquired an Asus TUF-AX3000_V2 where I installed FreshTomato. One can login via SSH and dump all settings for backup. Likewise, individual or all settings can be done on the command line instead of the GUI. I have a script on my computer that reads CSV files with MAC addresses and more to apply changes in an automated way.

Google is outsourcing their job to you, because you doing it for free is even cheaper than paying some poor fellow in India a dollar a day.

KDE Connect has been mentioned before. You can supplement this and other tools by using a VPN so that both endpoints can see each other even if the underlying network does not allow this. My preferred solutions are Tailscale (managed, cloud-based) or Headscale (for self-hosting).

Yes, XMPP with proper TLS on the server side and Conversations or one of its forks (preferably fetched from F-Droid) using OMEMO encryption should be good enough. If you are brave or paranoid, give Tox a try: https://tox.chat/

Maybe the first question is what your budget is, both regarding money and time. For example, you could buy a pre-configured NAS from Synology or QNAP, which requires less technical skills but more money, or a home-made solution reusing used components (but fresh disks for reliability). Depending on your electricity costs, you may want to choose a low-power solution or something which you power off when not used. For storage, maybe a three-disk RAID5 is a good compromise. For backups, plain S3 cloud storage encrypted via restic is a good idea.

Those of us who remember ‘Alf’ may wonder if the name is due to taste as well.

Well, you have Finland in the north-east, Ireland in the north-west, and every land border faces a Euro-zone country. Few other countries can claim the latter.

If at all, you want to use Gentoo's ebuild system, which can be seen as some kind of superset of PKGBUILDs. I guess one could write a Python script that “dumbs down” ebuild scripts to PKGBUILDs for simple packages (excluding complex stuff like kernel, KDE, …). The main challenge, as pointed to before, would be maintaining a table mapping package names between distributions in order to get the dependencies right.

Those would be harvested to train LLMs even without asking first. 😐

What comes to mind:

• Collect trash in nature
• Demonstrate in front of parliaments if politicians are about to make stupid laws
• Demonstrate outside of billionaires' properties demand that they pay their fair share to society

Yes, one of the factors that contributed to the demise of Windows Mobile was the lack of backwards-compatibility for apps between 7, 8, an 10.

Qt (the one used by KDE) has progressed not only through a number of owners (Trolltech, Digia, Nokia, …), but also licenses such as the QPL to be triple-licensed under GPL, LGPL, and commercial for most of its components.