The Youtube introduction video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igVscvWAR1s) is a great explanation of the tech and the end where he retrofits it into a Panasonic CF RZ is wild.
TrueNAS is just web-based configuration management. As long as you only use the web UI, your system state can be distilled down to the config file it generates.
If you do a vanilla FreeBSD+samba+NFS+ZFS setup, you'll need to edit several files around the file system, which are easy to forget months down the line in case of adjustment or disaster recovery.
I use KaTex (https://katex.org/) as part of static site generation, and I get LaTeX quality output (because it duplicates LaTeX's algorithm) using only CSS.
Using the eqn and troff suite in 2025 ... I'll just say there's a better way. LaTeX is arcane enough, but at least it is a universal standard in mathematical publication that it pays off to learn a little.
Yep, the closest I ever got to a SGI was drooling over their product brochures as a kid. The cost of a modest Indy was about the same as a mid-range car. It's hard to grasp as a modern PC user that these workstations could handle classes of problems that contemporary PCs could not, no matter what upgrades you did. Today, it would be like comparing a PC to a TPU-based (or similar ASIC) platform for computing.
From what I've read, Oxide is making racks of servers and has no interest in workstations that an individual would use.