One series I haven't seen recommended yet is Alastair Reynolds novels. Revelation Space is a wonderful series, and if you want to start with a standalone story House of Suns and Diamond Dogs are great choices.
For lighter reading there's also the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.
There's other older series that may appeal to you: Vatta's War and Vorkosigan Saga conf to mind.
Arch: I need reproducible setups. Also bleeding edge is not for me.
I have to give credit to their documentation though!
What put me off selinux is that the officially documented way of generating a new policy is to run a service unconfined, and then generating the policy from its behaviour. This is backwards on so many levels... In contrast policy-based admission control in kubernetes is a delight to use, and creating new policies is actually doable outside of a lab.
Confucius says: man who runs in front of car gets tired; man who runs behind car gets exhausted.
The pun is so bad it made me sigh. Top quality dad joke!
Dual CPU lets you have more cores of a particular family of processors. If you run a large amount of busy VMs concurrently then it might be handy.
However, this does not come for free. Compared to a single CPU with an equivalent number of threads, dual CPU has more complex memory access, and you don't want VMs and their memory to bounce between CPUs.
If you need it you'll know it. If you don't know if you need it then I would not recommend it.
Unless you run samba on them you won't see the Linux machines on Windows as a network computer.
That thing is going to be chugging power. Also note that it uses SAS drives, so you can't just use consumer SATA drives in it. ALSO 410s are from the 2009-2011 era. Do you really want to depend on a 10+ year old PSU? What's the cost going to be for you to find replacement parts?
Depends on the ratio. Producing and shipping new hardware has its cost too.
Peter F. Hamilton's books may fit the bill: Futuristic, not hopeless/dystopic, and the main characters tend to make reasonable decisions. Be wrned though that he favours deus ex machina conclusions. Most will suggest Pandora's Star as a starting point (with good reason, as the Commonwealth Saga is quite expansive), but it does not have to be. I personally read the Night's Dawn trilogy first. The Salvation trilogy also stands on its own, and for a completely standalone book Great North Road was a good read.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is another wonderful author! the Children of Time and Final Architecture series were quite enjoyable.
Redemption Space (Alastair Reynolds) is another series one that I like to recommend. Closer to The Expanse. House of Suns also is a great read by the same author, as are several of his other stories.
The White Space books by Elizabeth Bear should be on your reading list.
Vorkosigan Saga (Lois McMaster Bujold) is a bit dated but similar to Vatta's War in the earlier books. Later on the plot tends to be more along the lines of whodunnit mystery... in space.
And let's not forget another scifi favourite, Iain M. Banks! The Culture series are great of course, but I liked The Algebraist the best.