20% is a LOT. That's probably because of the random shit that nobody ever asked for but windows is always doing in the background anyway. Building a search index, windows update (which consumes an insane amount of CPU for a completely unreasonable amount of time sometimes), other individual updater services (because there can't be one program that updates everything because every vendor does their own proprietary bullshit to handle updates), compressing and sending all you personal data to microsoft and of course the pre-installed McAffee (on trial license) that works hard to make your system less secure (that HP probably installed for you because apperently you haven't paid enough money for the computer, so you must pay with your patience and your privacy as well). Depending on the benchmark, the pathetic legacy file system windows uses might also play a role.
Ma...ma.... Marvel movies are mostly redundant bullshit without even a single relevant thought in them. Just like these mass-produced romcoms, same level. They will probably be the first movies written and produced by inferior AI soon and it won't even make a big difference.
Yes, the linux kernel will work! I'd say it's even more likely that wifi, soundcard, etc. work without any problems than if you'd buy a bleeding edge laptop (although these mostly also just work nowadays). The oldest machine I've got is a laptop from 12 years ago which easily runs modern linux, but even much older machines shouldn't have a problem with that, at least not with the kernel.
The point is imagining that others would look up to you*
*While in reality, literally not a single person on earth gives even the tiniest fuck about you wasting money on a useless, annoyingly noisy and wasteful fucking car. Exceptions are 5 year olds and people who never exceeded that intellectual level.
PHP is a shit language, but far from dead. There are too many legacy killer apps that are used A LOT and won't be rewritten in a different language anytime soon. E.g. Wordpress, Mediawiki (The engine behind wikipedia and other wikis), Nextcloud, Typo3, ...
The JS one is not surprising at all. There's no other loosely typed multi-paradigm scripting language where such insane shitloads of money and developer time have been spent for optimizing its execution (by some of the largest tech companies). Kinda funny considering that the language design is complete horse shit.
Your 2nd point is really quite surprising. I also wouldn't have thought that java would beat Go in both energy and time by that margin!
No, for the 4,50€ one you can choose betseen either 50GB extra fast NVMe storage or 200GB SATA SSD storage, which should be fine for a private nextcloud.
It should run fine for personal use on an rpi4 or 5. The sd card is definitely a bottle neck though, so using a fast usb3 ssd for that probably makes a big difference.
Servers cost money, nothing can change that. But you could use a computer at home thats running all the time and then use a dynamic dns service (there are free ones) to access your home server from everywhere. That way you've got the electricity cost of an always running computer, so it's not entirely free either. Maybe use a sbc like raspberrypi, bananapi, odroid or the like, these are very efficient.
If you consider using a paid VPS instead, I can recommend contabo, since they are very affordable and work like a charm, e.g. the 200GB SSD variant for 4,50€/month:
https://contabo.com/de/vps/
I can't help you but I just came here to say that I also very much dislike the trend that everything has to look flat. Imho visual, simulated depth (through shadows, gradients, etc.) can make UIs look actually much cleaner, because hierarchy, grouping of elements and differentiation between buttons/text inputs and non-interactive elements is often much more obvious on first sight.
For some time now I mostly write rust and I'm actually very satisfied with VS Code and rust-analyzer. I tried intelliJ-rust but didn't find it better. To be fair, I haven't tried the new jetbrains rust IDE though.
Yes, I can't wait! Firefox usage will skyrocket :D