Aties
I’m glad I have finally seen someone else who appreciates windows 8 (or at least is willing to admit it). People just lose their shit when there are any changes to the start menu, but the best start menu is to not have one at all.
Windows 8 has way better hotkeys (limit seaeching to files, programs, or applications) compared to the unified search in newer versions.
Niagara was an easy 5 stars and lifetime purchase, but I now have a seething hatred for apps that stick random words as a prefix; for example, “myCigna” or “Fly Delta” because it ruins alphabetical sorting. I rate them 1 star for their ridiculous naming practices, but I feel like I need to do something more drastic to communicate my anger.
Have you considered something like jupyterhub?
I went down this path, but mini itx nucs with a GPU slot seemed to be better as long as you’re not using the egpu on multiple devices; if you are, then it might be worth considering just making a PC a host and running sunshine/moonlight. While I haven’t tried connecting to my host on the steamdeck, I have on my laptop and felt like it could be used for gaming