The distraction is currently no doubt from the takeing over of certain essential government agencies, hollowing them out, getting rid of anyone critical of the new regime.

Because they learned nothing

What makes you think big finance likes to keep regulation? Someone’s loss is another one’s profit. Some people become very very rich from financial crises.

Honestly why not just use an old laptop you have laying around to test 1 or 2 of your many project/ideas and see how it goes, before going 4000 $ deep.

Not OP. I’m willing to learn Docker, but I just can’t get it going. My machine is permanently connected through nordvpn, I use meshnet to access it from other devices if I’m not on local wifi. The docker + VPN doesn’t work. Docker fails to download anything from docker hub, every request times out. Any instructions to bypass it looked very difficult, manually editing subnets or something, I feel uncomfortable with. Disabling services, then disabling VPN, then installing docker stuff and then restarting services and VPN also seems silly. I got lots going throught dietpi (many nicely embedded services), though it’s holding me back for example from running jellyseerr