I live in a small tourist town (Ashland, OR), so I'm kinda in a mix where everything is compact and in one place, and services are common and very handy, whilst also having a lot of that beauty that living rural comes with, my only real issue here being the expense of everything.

My father lives in a "country roads" kind of environment as of recently, and I can personally confirm that I prefer being in a population of people in general, it's beautiful there, but I definitely felt "isolated" of sorts.

In my curiosity, I bought a Nook Simple Touch off eBay for 15 dollars a few months ago. It actually works really great for reading EPUBs off Overdrive and OpenLibrary, and it definitely makes night reading a hell of a lot more comfortable, lasts quite long on battery, even as a cheap second hand device.

If you're intending to purely stream games or something along those lines, you might want to look at one of those really cheap Fire tablets, new or used. They clearly are intended with planned obsolescence in mind unfortunately, but as long as you get one from 2015 after, you probably shouldn't have any issues with app compatibility. Do note that if you plan on rooting or installing Linux, they aren't that great of an option as their process is strange and complicated.

In terms of running Linux on, there are a few Atom-based cheap 8-10 inch tablets from Dell and other manufacturers that you can buy for dirt cheap used, and they could probably serve your purpose quite well.

Even as a person who's gone through the Almeda fires in Southern Oregon, this is one of the most horrifying videos I've watched. The entire area seems to be engulfed in flames, I hope everyone is able to evacuate safely.

I use a near-base model 2020 M1 Air, 512GB SSD and still 8GB RAM. One thing I can confirm is that this thing very rarely slows down. That being said, I'm a software developer that doesn't do anything THAT rigorous, but I've been able to smoothly do tasks in the background during compiling, and goes through it quickly. I have some friends that do heavy work with Logic Pro, and their base M1s have no problem as well.

So all in all, whilst it ultimately depends on the type of work and intent to be done with it, $3000 is still probably overkill, even with a Mac.

I just started using kbin.social after not really feeling satisfied with Mastodon personally, wanting something more topical like Lemmy, but I still wanted some Mastodon compatibility due to most of my mutuals on the Fediverse using Mastodon. Landed myself here, so far so good!