Firefox is also really good on Android these days. I use that with all the usual ad blocking and privacy extensions I have on desktop.

ALVR works great, assuming SteamVR in general works with your DE (no Gnome support atm but KDE works for sure).

That display out will be hard to match with an old optiplex or laptop, but I agree, the pricing is getting less absurdly low and more just moderately low.

Since you mentioned darktable I assume you already know this, but depending on the camera's raws and the presets that imagemagick has for converting these photos the results might be undesirable if not inspected or tweaked. Not disparaging any advice given here, just mentioning that generally raws are edited on a case by case basis to fix camera artifacts and color issues. Hope the solutions others have posted work out for you!

Looks cool! But the GitHub mentions needing a 40-80GB GPU? Was really hoping to test this out myself but it looks like that may be out of the cards for me.

This is legitimately terrifying and extremely impressive if the demo they show in the gif reflects the quality of the output. Especially if this is going to be a free feature.

Yes! Glad to see that others have an eye on this. This is made by the developers of Craftopia, and if you've seen that game, you'd have no doubts that they will at least try desperately to make the promised features work. It isn't unlikely that it will be a technical disaster, but I'm sure it will be fun.

Been using it exclusively for about a year. Very satisfied with the performance. It is a very no-nonsense service. They provide a VPN, anonymous payment options, and a flat rate regardless how much you buy at a time or when you buy (which is personally a big plus for me). They don't bug you to renew, and they don't offer any sort of auto-renewal. The only downside I could see is that if you are looking for a VPN provider that offers a large suite of privacy-adjacent tools labeled as a VPN app, you would be disappointed.