That’s true, if there’s no load then the difference isn’t much money.
I’m running a NAS, some game servers, a forgejo instance and a jellyfin server and more on my machine so it’s never truly idle and I forgot to think about that metric.

Ah right, that rings a bell. Proxmox and Ceph sounds like a perfect experiment for OPs hardware. :)
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pveceph.html

Yeah, I focused on the I’m just looking for some fun experiments, projects part.
I wouldn’t use the machines for anything other than experimenting for fun, they’re power hungry too if counting per performance.

I would look into setting up a proxmox cluster with high availability on them and from there you can look into fun projects that you can run as proxmox vms or lxcs.
https://www.xda-developers.com/proxmox-cluster-guide/
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/High_Availability

edit: HA seems to require a shared disk, such as a SAN or NAS.

For those of us using Firefox there was a post on !youshouldknow@lemmy.world on how you can use uBlock Origin to create word filters.

To do so, open up the uBlock Origin dashboard, go to the ‘My filters’ tab, and add this filter:

lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/word1|word2|word3|word4/i)

For example:

lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/Trump|Elon|Musk|nazi/i)  

Running games on Linux:
Using the Heroic Game Launcher you can install GOG/Epic Games games with a simple click, Steam works pretty much the same in Linux as in Windows today.
There’s also Lutris that’s great for running local windows installers (downloaded game installers from GOG f.e.). I used Lutris when my wife needed to install the EA App to run Sims 4 as a usage example.

PLEASE NOTE
The exception is some games actively blocking non-windows (Fortnite) and others using Anti cheats that requires Windows to work.

Gaming on Linux links
Where I usually check if a game runs properly on Linux - https://www.protondb.com/
A site that lists games that doesn’t work due to anticheat - https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Game launchers for other storefronts than Steam:
https://lutris.net/
https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

Linux DE and Distros
If you want a desktop environment that is similar to Windows as default and uses the latest graphics protocols in Wayland and so on then look into KDE. As a bonus KDE is developed by a non profit based in Germany.
OpenSUSE is a distro developed by a german company that uses KDE as default - https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/?type=desktop
Normally I recommend Fedora KDE as a distro but that is developed by Red Hat which in turn is owned by IBM which feels a bit contrary to “Buy European”.