My only point was that “life is too short” and LouAvul might want to consider moving on from his box and getting something easier.
Totally agree, and your advice is what I would and did do anyway : I bought one with 4x the threads of execution, 4x memory, and 4x ssd — used and five years old for $1000. For me the first reason that comes to mind is “it’s the cost of doing business”, but if it wasn’t it would still be exactly what you said, “life’s too short”. Linux wouldn’t do this (hog all the user space I freed up) but I also want to run TurboTax etc, and big companies only support models and os releases that go back about 5 years.
But there is also something a colleague (IBM Fellow) told me in 1989 : “Your stuff Just Works… You Don’t have to Mess With It to get it to work”. I used to (about 2015) say that about Apple’s OS and systems, and found out other people were saying it too — for instance backup with Time Machine — but now I can’t. I’m pushing it harder, and they have kids hacking on MacOS (maybe they are using AI or bargain Indians which are just as ignorant) until it looks less and less like the UNIX they licensed. You can’t even copy your Time Machine backups to a different disk. That’s totally giving up on satisfying fundamental requirements. Sometimes you find out processes in a different terminal are opening stale versions of a written and closed file. Again, they abandoned important parts of the OS design that made UNIX something more than the overgrown child’s toy the MS OSs are.