GoDaddy was my first registrar in like 2004 and leaving them was an extremely difficult process at the time. I believe they made it troublesome on purpose, though I would not also rule out incompetence.
I don't buy new computers anymore. I only buy computers that are a few years old. The last one I purchased was a Thinkpad T420s with the wide screen, maxed out the RAM, popped in an SSD, and for under $500. Works like a charm. Linux gives me no major problems.
If I was going to buy another Mac, it would probably be a 2015ish 13" MBP. I currently have an 11" 2012 Air that is perfectly fine for the type of development I do and shows only minor signs of impending failure. I would def get another one of these as well.
I mean, if you think about it, any time you run any installer, whether via brew install, apt-get install, or an .exe or .msi, you're effectively running someone else's unknown code on your system, often as a superuser (e.g. with sudo apt-get install). Is there a significant difference here? At least in this case you could potentially download the shell file and read it before you run it, unlike with a binary executable.
Agreed. Freenode is the network I frequent the most. Some of the programming language and framework specific channels are good. As it has always been, IRC can seem like a pretty hostile place to "noobs"; just don't ask to ask and RTFM before you do.