Out of curiosity, with COVID I imagine people are WFH more and there's a tendency for that to continue. Did you think about buying a desktop instead? Usually is much better value for the money and Linux is likely to run without issues too.
That has also been my experience. Truth is, there are many good developers out there. Maybe they can't be bothered to practice for leetcode (and why should you do it if you do not have 100k applicants per open role?).
In ~4h total time interview you can have a very strong feeling if someone will be a fit culturally and if they aren't incompetent. Give them a chance.
Or you can spend months and many more hours to roll a dice with a bit higher chance of making a better hire...
I'm excited about the things I can build with software, not so much about software itself. All the problems we can solve with OSS tools.. is truly amazing!
If a new database comes and is better than postgres, I might switch to it in a couple of years, but, I wouldn't want to be working in a new database. Software for software sakes doesn't motivate me too much.
Solving problems for the film industry with visual effects does motivate me a lot. I love seeing the end product and being part of it by making the studio and artists more efficient! That I can do it by using my tech skills is awesome.
Because it wasn't mentioned yet, Dropbox was quite magical as an end user tool. You use your computer normally with folders and everything is sync'd to other computers.
Unfortunately dropbox the company chose to grow into everything except their core product.
I think you misunderstand how Ansible is supposed to work. You can put in the work (much less than ~ 6 months, I'm available for freelancing!) and have it working. By then you will be able to run your command :-)
You will also be able to share as much of the deployment as you want/can between the different models/OSes. Templating configuration variables based on their characteristics.
What you're asking to is akin to "Why cannot I download an app that does what $PRODUCT does but for my business for free? Why do I need to write my own software?"
In the case of bricking, a strategy I've seen is have two partitions in your flash (I am imagining your device has a flash?) then a watchdog can verify the health your deployment, in case your deployment is unhealth it can boot from the known good partition.
I've used Ansible to manage thousands of baremetal servers, you do have to build some stuff yourself but it mostly just works. The Ansible framework for gathering facts is pretty neat, it has a framework to do X or Y depending on facts from hosts, you can run it in pull model or push model, through AWX or jenkins. A lot of freedom.
If you want something that just works automatically and is free, well, I don't think you will find. Learning Ansible (or another configuration management tool) well will pay dividends through a lot of your career tho.