I’ve had great results with various refurbished Dell Latitudes from eBay over the years. I have a stack of about 5 or 6 of 'em and they’ve all run many mainstream Linux distros with fantastic out-of-the-box support. I pass 'em out to members of the household whenever a laptop is needed and they’ll usually get the job done.

I’d just type in “Dell Latitude” on eBay and filter by price and such. I suspect any model with an i5 and 8GB RAM oughta be fine for light programming work. I’ve found sellers with high ratings (like 97% or higher) and thousands of sales are pretty reliable (and tend to have return policies in case you get a lemon). Just test all the hardware (webcam, microphone, headphone jack, USB ports, ethernet, etc) as soon as you get it.

I’ve saved a lot of money over the years buying secondhand, and these machines have been running without a hiccup for years of casual use.

Came here to say something similar. I always have mixed feelings on Scrubs for similar reasons to you. I genuinely can’t go back and rewatch most episodes because they are incredibly dated or insensitive in many respects. The good parts are still good, the great parts are still great, but the bad parts feel really bad IMO, and it really kills a lot of rewatch potential for me, despite having loved watching seasons 1-5 when it was originally airing. It was one of my favorite shows for years.

I can definitely watch older stuff and understand it’s a product of its time, but Scrubs in particular has me cringing by 5 minutes into the episode; I can’t get through the rest of the episode most of the time. I end up skipping around to watch the scenes I know I like. I ain’t got time to sit around watchin’ The Todd harass people or Kelso make his usual “wife bad” jokes.

What a soundtrack, though. One of the better soundtracks of any show I’ve watched.

I haven’t had to deal with this specific kind of use case before (accessing the local Jellyfin service while the laptop is connected to a VPN), but after some cursory research, one of these approaches may work for you:

Easy Option (only available on some VPN software):

There may be an option in your VPN client that lets you access local network addresses like your Jellyfin server. Check your settings and see if there are any options like “allow local network traffic” and then try opening up your Jellyfin server in a browser (e.g.: http://192.168.1.100:8096/)

Less Easy Option:

If your VPN client doesn’t have an option for allowing local traffic, you can open up the command prompt on your macbook and run a command like this:

sudo route add -net 192.168.1.0/24 192.168.1.1

Where 192.168.1.0/24 is the local network you want to connect to (where the Jellyfin server is located), and 192.168.1.1 is your local gateway (probably your wifi router’s address). Change both of these depending on how your network’s local IPs are formatted.

This should update your routing table to handle local network addresses without the VPN and this should persist between reboots.

Hope this helps.

This is one reason I really liked my Dynamics professor. On the first day of class, he wrote “F=ma” on the white board and said, “See that equation? It hasn’t changed much in the last 200 years. You don’t need to buy the newest edition of the textbook; it’s mostly just fixing errata. The lessons are virtually the same as the first edition.”

Setting up remote access for Jellyfin felt pretty trivial for me like 2 years ago when switching away from Plex. No hiccups that I can recall whatsoever. Except for maybe the nginx reverse proxy configuration, but the documentation made it decently straightforward, but that step isn’t strictly necessary to get remote access working; that was just something I wanted for my particular setup.

And I wouldn’t call the Jellyfin UI janky at all. I use it every day and can’t think of any common issues I encounter when using it. There surely are quirks with some features, but I find them few and far between. I recall Plex having its own UI quirks back when I used it.

Reminds me of how Zeus cobbled together Pegasus from a handful of different kinds of clouds in Hercules.

“Hmm, let’s see here. A little cirrus… a touch of nimbostratus, and a dash of cumulus.”

GIMP feels like it’s still in the stage of being extremely powerful but awkward as heck to wield, like Blender used to be. Blender used to have a pretty unintuitive interface before getting a massive overhaul a few years back. GIMP could use a similar facelift IMO.