A few years ago I set up a Pi 4 8GB to have as a backup in case my old Mac Mini died. Last year the Mac's HD died and it got me through the few weeks it took me get the Mac back up and running.

One of our daughters moved in with us shortly after that so I moved the Pi to our family room and she's been using it since.

I used an "Argon" case that moves all the ports to rear of the case. It has a fan to cool it if it gets too heated up and I configured it to boot off an external SSD drive. That was pretty easy to do and makes a huge difference in how fast it boots up and loads apps.

I bumped up the processor speed a bit, it's not as fast as my old Mac and the tools not quite as polished but Geaney is a pretty good text editor for coding and FileZilla works fine to get and put files.

Aside from a web browser those are the tools I use most so the money and time spent on setting that up was well worth it and it's more than paid for itself.