Home Assistant? Maybe a homepage like Heimdall or some other dashboard? Maybe Uptime Kuma to notify you when your services go down? Definately a pihole or adguard home. Biggest quality of life improvement. It’s the biggest thing my wife notices and approves of. She audibly groans in disgust when she leaves the LAN on her cellphone and sees all the ads and garbage that had previously been blocked. My pihole dashboard show 70% of the requests are blocked on my LAN. And everything works great.

Yes you can cluster devices. I have a NAS in addition to the my laptop proxmox cluster. It lets me use the NAS as storage, so the VMs/lxc’s virtual disks are actually on the NAS. This allows me to make the VM/LXCs Highly Available. So if one laptop crashes it’ll automatically spin up the things running on that laptop on a different one. This can also be done with ceph, but I already had the NAS, so ceph seemed redundant.

Either or both will likely work just fine depending on how broken the screen is. The virusy windows would be easiest (sometimes macbooks are harder to get everything working due to drivers, windows ones typically just work). But the virus will be removed when you install proxmox. I currently have 3 laptops in various degrees of old and broken being used as a proxmox cluster.

Do you have any old hardware lying around? Old gaming pc, or an old laptop? Doesn’t matter if it has a broken screen or keyboard or trackpad or can’t upgrade to win11. Maybe ask around if someone you knows has something similar.

I’d start with that. Then save the money for an upgrade to the old hardware like adding some extra RAM and a big refurbed hdds.

Done this with massive log files. Used perl and regex. That’s basically what the language was built for.

But with CSVs? I’d throw them in a db with an index.