Take a look at hosting your own Nextcloud instance. It'll replace Google drive, photos, docs, everything--there's phone apps for iPhone and android. If you want to store your PC backups on it, that's probably fine too. It might even work ok on the Pi 4 (though some parts it has integrations with may have trouble, like Nextcloud Office, since they may not have ARM binaries in their distribution).
It should work great on your local network and still be acceptable when uploading out and about (photos can auto sync if you turn that on on your Nextcloud phone app).
If 4TB is enough for your needs, I'd suggest getting another 4TB and making them a RAID1 pair using mdadm, and then probably also another 4TB to make backups of Nextcloud and Nextcloud data onto to keep offsite. You can never have too many copies of your data.
I'm not sure what to do about the variety of smaller drives. I can say I wouldn't recommend consolidating them onto a single drive, because I did that once (many drives ranging from 60 gigglebytes to 300, onto one 1.5 TB drive) and then formatted or got rid of the smaller ones...and then dropped the 1.5 TB drive on the floor while it was running. Rip. But just like the above, a RAID1 array composed of two big drives would probably be fine.
Just make sure to set up some alerts for when a drive fails.
I'm really curious to know what it is that causes this. I can't get mine to do it. Even with something like 3dmark, or heavy games at 120 FPS. It gets no warmer than any other iPhone I've had. Which is to say, it gets warm, yeah, but not to the point I can't hold it.
ITT: some people are mad the web became the application platform of choice, in part due to handy dandy cross platform app tools like Electron and accessible languages like JavaScript.
There is no perfect answer. Qt isn't using the platform's native capabilities to the fullest extent either. Qt requires a "wrapper" too--all those libraries your app depends on, to name a few (unless you got a commercial license and are compiling statically, you rich devil).
Let's celebrate the onslaught of apps that work with Linux instead of trying to scare off developers any more than Linux already did. Make love not war. <3
In my experience, Electron and other "web wrapper" apps run just fine and I have enough CPU and RAM to run a dozen of them alongside my 50 browser tabs. Slack, Discord, VSCode, Teams, IRCCloud, it all works fine. Hardware is cheap compared to my time.
I have an iPhone through T-mobile and I don't have to pay extra for my hotspot. Kinda hilarious, though, I only get 20 gigglebytes of high speed hotspot, which my 5g can blow through in as little as 3 minutes 45 seconds as of the latest speed test (712mbps). After that, it caps it at 600kbps. They have no problem with me using hundreds of gigglebytes directly on the phone, for some reason, I don't see why they have to limit hotspot.
It's kind of hilarious they didn't just build this into the options app. But WebUSB gets a bad rap for no good reason.
WebUSB's only sin is that it's being spearheaded by Google. It's a useful technology that means theoretically you only need to write to one platform - the web. Let the browser deal with the different USB APIs for each OS (please god google save me from libusb). It's safer because of the browser's sandboxing, the permission dialog, the much greater likelihood they're using good standard TLS instead of rolling their own encryption, the list goes on.
Personally, I'd rather visit a web page one time to set it up and then forget about it, than to have to install Yet Another Thing™ that ends up running in the background, always checking for updates, reporting analytics back to the mothership, and constantly sucking up just a little bit of my CPU time even when I don't have any Logitech devices connected. (Sound like any other Logitech software you know of?)
I had a Pixel phone that I wanted to reflash back to the standard factory image. Did I have to download a special program, reboot the phone into bootloader mode, and perform an ancient ritual sacrifice like I do with a Samsung phone? No, I just had to visit the right web page and click "yes, allow this page to fuck up my phone". No lingering software left over on my PC, at least once the browser cache goes away.
Same with many Arduino and ESP32 projects, by way of WebSerial. If the page you're reading doesn't have to send you off to some other program and can just, right there in the web page, flash your device with the software it's telling you about, that's a good thing.
The web is becoming the application platform of choice. No App Store guardians to reject you from it. No 30% cut to the man. The list of reasons to have to install a program to your native OS is shrinking. Even 3d games can be done entirely in the web now. Rejecting WebUSB/WebSerial just means developers have to keep writing stuff for every OS (if you're lucky).
It's lighter than a VM but a bit heavier than aiming to run an application natively (and all the dependency & configuration hell that entails).
Basically a convenient way to package and run applications with all their dependencies, without regard for what libraries & configurations exist in the host OS and other containers.
If your application only works with up to version 42 of the Whatchamacallit library, you ship it with that version of Whatchamacallit, the underlying OS doesn't need to install it. Other containers running on the system that depend on that library don't get broken since they're packaged with version 69 which works fine for them.
I have a Galaxy A13 as a test phone for work. Not great, but great for the price. The UI is fine. Cheap Android phones have gotten a lot better recently.
I have a Galaxy Tab S8 for myself. I like the 120hz screen and the design, it feels solid and pretty. Good speakers. I also have a Galaxy Tab A7 Lite that I got for free from T-mobile. I like the size
Got a couple of Galaxy Tab S5e at work for testing purposes as well. Currently both of them have been hacked up to install Android Automotive and one of them is in my car serving as my infotainment system. Pretty sweet.
I wish Samsung would allow unlockable bootloaders on their US phones/tablets with cellular radios in them. I want to hack up my A7 Lite to install Android Automotive so I don't have to hotspot to the S5e anymore.
All good points. I fully agree, and I deserve it for living on the edge of technology like this. (The cavemen probably burned a few eyebrows off before figuring out not to touch the fire)
Worth noting, I didn't mean to use snap, it was that "apt install chromium-browser" transparently installed it as a snap and I wasn't paying attention at the time.
In general I don't really care one way or another between apt, snap, or just plain downloading the source and doing a good old fashioned build from source like the old days. I just didn't know to expect this certain installation method to lock out a certain browser feature I needed at the time. Now I know, so I won't use snap for that (or maybe ever, I'm debating whether I just uninstall it). I wonder what fell out of my brain to make room for that, though. :D
I am pretty sure the no display sleep thing is down to whether I had a VirtualBox machine as the active window when I left it, so my "fix" is just to make sure I click some other window before I leave the desk. I have had fine experiences running VMs in Windows, nothing to report. I even do crazy stuff like pass through USB devices to the guest machine and all (that seems to work regardless of what host OS I run it on).
I do run into things on Windows and Mac sometimes, to be completely fair. Just fewer and further between. Maybe that's just because there's fewer things I can do on them, though. (Can't build embedded Linux or Android images on them)
I wasn't trying to use snap, but the apt package did a sneaky and installed the snap for me, as I found out when I hit the about and realized my Chromium was a snap package. They decided to move it to a transition package a few years back and I missed the memo.
Fair point that 20.04 is ancient. However, I have tried 22.04 and some stuff I tried to build with Yocto Project could no longer build, so I left my main machine at 20.04. Or was it the AOSP build that failed? I forget by now. Urgh. So much crap I'll have to test when switching. :(
I just want a picture of a goddang hotdog