I'm like a test-bed for a) my business customers and b) friends and family. also, "wasting" time thusly is vastly better than my previous "hobby", namely buying new and exciting shit.

my customers benefit from me knowing how exactly (and why!) I should implement e.g. an unbound instance on-premise. or an in-house prosody communication platform. or the "dev team" (buncha dudes poking at wordpress) getting a slew of used elitebooks with linux for the price of one new windows-with-ai yoga the spec initially called for.

f&f benefit from my early adoption by way of trickle-down tech. no way is anyone of them going to selfhost all this crap, but they get sprinkles of benefits in the form of "get this phone with that OS with those apps" and they're dramatically better off. you don't need the new ideapad ryzen that's "on sale" (isn't), have this 10-year old macbook I fixed and installed linux on - off you go. you don't need the new phone that's "free" with an exorbitantly priced plan, have the cheapest plan with this Redmi/Poco phone I swapped the battery on and installed LineageOS.

as to practical considerations, any and all interactions with the likes of FAANG are and should be adversarial from the get-go, they are out to hurt you by any means necessary. them fucks lost the benefit of doubt ages ago so you not letting them have a millimeter of grasp in your domicile should be your primary task. as their gains are cumulative in nature, every battle won is significant and you'd do well to remind yourself constantly of that.