I am proficient in photoshop as well, albeit nonprofessional. That being said, GIMP on its own is realllly hard to use after coming from PS. But with photogimp it’s a ton easier. I wouldn’t say it’s quite as good, but it’s pretty close. I’d give that a shot, at the very least.

I’ve used Termius on my iPhone, it works pretty well. Unsure if they’ve got an iPad client but I would be surprised if they didn’t?

An HBA (host bus adapter) is a SAS controller (or rather, has a SAS controller chip on it). You mostly just want to make sure that your host (the server) has enough physical PCIe lanes to use the whole card, otherwise you’ll get bottlenecked there. You also want to check whether you’ve got 6G SAS or 12G SAS capability. If your drives only support 6 gig, for example, there’s zero point in buying a 12G SAS card, which is actually nice because 6G cards are a lot cheaper. You do want to make sure you actually need an HBA and not a RAID controller though - they’re easily confused. Not sure if I actually answered anything there but I write SAS firmware and use HBAs all the time, so feel free to ask me more and I’ll try to piece together a coherent answer.

My uni used Ubuntu in the CompE computer labs; unfortunately all other labs were windows. But the introduction to Linux was certainly nice!

As someone that works at a storage devices company - we do still manufacture 10K HDDs. They are faster than the 7200s of the same spec, by nature. All 2.5” drives for enterprise systems. And will actually continue selling them until ~2030. That said, they’re all but obsolete at this point, and aren’t really being developed on any more.

If Google had a baby she would drop it on its head spike it at the ground

Shitty k8s cluster/space heater?