No problem! Yeah, as long as you have the space, I think this would be a good way to repurpose an old junker PC. I imagine a quick search of something along the lines of “how to configure a samba server” should bring up some decent tutorials.

I use an older HP thin client PC with a 4TB solid state drive as an SFTP file server using vsftpd, but if you are local only then an SMB server using samba would probably be fine. I use SFTP because I wanted something a bit more secure which I can port-forward with my router on a random higher-numbered port for remote access.

I mostly taught myself how to do this by looking at guides originally meant for the raspberry pi, but there is nothing different about running these same programs on Debian or the like. Personally, I would not recommend a raspbery pi for a large file server, as they do not natively support SSDs without additional hardware which will make the price significantly higher and less self-contained than a used, older-gen thin-client PC which can be had for relatively low cost on places like ebay (though they do make some fairly high capacity micro SD cards these days).

Hardware-wise, generally these types of servers are not CPU intensive, nor do they require any particularly high amount of RAM, so an older-gen or lower power CPU can often work fine, but you should probably make sure to get something with at least gigabit ethernet speeds, as a 100Mbit connection on, say, a raspberry pi 3 or older will be very slow for transferring large files.

I mostly learned from some of the terminal customization which came stock with Manjaro when I was first learning Linux. So when I made the jump to Arch, I customized my terminal with fsh with the powerlevel10k theme and text highlighting. I also modified some of the default text colors to a green color to evoke green phosphor CRT terminals.

A chamomile blend by Tealyra called “Tranquil Nights”

I would say that there is not much of a “culture” around green tea specifically, as there tends to be a much stronger culture of black tea, at least where I am on the east coast (Hot black tea in the Northeast/New England, iced/sweetened black tea in the Southeast).

As others have stated, most Americans would be familiar with it in teabags or bottled green tea, and so many who do end up trying it don’t enjoy it because they end up trying a bitter, lesser-quality version of it. Others may be familiar with it in Japanese or Chinese restaurants, where the quality is hopefully better, but this probably cannot be rightly called American green tea culture.

In my experience, it is the sort of thing where the green teabags might be the only ones left in an office meeting room because, while someone thought to stock the meeting room with green tea in the first place, all the others have been used up first and then someone has forgotten to refill them.

Daily Arch user here. The process of configuring an Arch install is perhaps not as difficult or mystical as you are imagining. I would say it is more like your first analogy: picking what off-the-shelf parts you want for a system and then putting them into a case. I think what you are describing is more like Linux from Scratch.

Installing Arch is effectively taking the steps performed by the installer .iso disks which every distro uses and instead doing it manually with CLI commands. You use CLI commands to partition the drive, create a filesystem, install a basic set of packages, then chroot into your system and use the package manager to install the rest of the packages you want. Aside from editing a couple config files, there is zero coding involved. The exact steps vary from guide to guide, but a basic outline of what I do is as follows:

• First, I download the Arch iso and write it to a USB.

• Once I boot up the install USB, I use iwctl to connect to my wifi for the packages I will need to download,

• then I use fdisk to partition the drive I want to install to with an EFI and linux filesystem partition (You might also make a swap partition at this step but I typically use a swap file on my filesystem partition).

• then you use mkfs to create filesystems on the EFI and linux filesystem partitions.

• Then I use genfstab to make the /etc/fstab file

• Then, I use pacstrap to install the base packages like pacman. Then I mount the filesystem and chroot into the new partition.

• From there, I basically use pacman to install all the packages I need, including the linux kernel (I use linux-zen), the DE (I use KDE), the boot manager (I use Refind), and everything else. There are a few cleanup steps like setting the locales and time zones, etc. but that is about it.

I suggest watching a guide on youtube, which was how I learned, or installing something like Arcolinux or Endeavour, which simplifies the installer into a series of checkboxes to select what DE you want, etc.

I would say that looseleaf green tea would be a big step up from teabags. A strainer basket that goes in a mug is a very low-fuss way to make looseleaf tea, as they are easy to clean and reusable. Looseleaf Japanese sencha was a game-changer for what I thought green tea could be.

I am personally not a huge fan of the mesh balls as tea tends to escape out from the gap along the middle, and for green tea especially, too much particulate can be bitter.

I also have a teapot with a strainer which functions much the same way, but for when I want to brew more than one cup.