Wine is pretty good for most things I've tried, except new Office (will run the old versions OK). Try O365, if Libre Office won't cut it. You can try the installer in Wine without hurting anything. For your other stuff,I keep a Windows 8 vm around off network to run some ancient radio programming software, so maybe that is an option.
And it is not scary. A simple distro like Mint, figure out where the software repositories live, how to use thr off8xe suite, and you're done. Life is "great*.
Pretty much this. Imagine some untutored user given the jellyfin client. They can figure it out pretty quickly as it is much like Netflix. Compare that to a Kofi on a Pi, first you have a keyboard/mouse. OK, then arrow keys and spacebar get you a ways in - now how do I stop the video? Panic till you find out it's the X key.
It is the simplicity vs functionality debate. Kodi is amazingly configurable but it is not accessible for your normal household user without a ton of work. Jellyfin(as an example) just runs on the Roku they are already using.
Eventually I'm getting off my old Roku 3 permanently for Kodi, so I'm just saying I wish Kodi had a dummy mode.
Er I'm still running a FX-8350 as a gaming machine (not AAA games obviously). I had another one as a host for a few VMs and it was more than enough till the motherboard went. One day I'll upgrade I guess.
A couple of our early carriers did have cruiser 8-inch gun turrets. I think Lexington still had hers when she was sunk but yeah they didn't do that again.
Same here. Static IP though. I did set up another experiment with a haproxy vps just to see if I could do it if I lost my static IP, worked perfectly done that way too.
OK I'll take a look at it, interesting.