You’re absolutely right. We need to have many different options for many different people.

Do I need to have elevated network permissions to do that? I don’t have admin access on my WiFi network and it is shared with a lot of people.

The hardware switch looks promising. Are there any decent ones for under $50 out there or are they usually a big investment?

I’m thinking use it to host a Minecraft or matrix server. I’m not expierenced with networking so nothing super advanced.

LMDE is rock solid. I’ve been using it for a while and It Just Works.

You can get a used thinkpad T480 off eBay for ~$150. I’ve dropped it multiple times and spilled orange juice on it and it works perfectly fine. No issues running Linux mint Debian edition. Main drawback is the fan which isn’t the most efficient at cooling, but it is upgradeable.