Richard

Are you certain that Element does not run in the background? It always does for me, both on my Samsung with OneUI and on another Samsung with LineageOS. Perhaps not really helpful, but my observation is that Element’s background “listening for notifications” is quite reliable. Might this be due to some settings in your OS?

I don’t want it to have any JavaScript

That’s not going to happen. I also don’t understand why you wouldn’t want JavaScript. All the concerns with it are about the times when you access a website by a proprietary software maker and encounter obfuscated and opaque code that you can only with great difficulty reconstruct what it does. But JavaScript “in the right hands”, like on a FOSS website, is perfectly fine and even required to make a webpage that can actually do something more than simply display text or images.

I would personally attempt the Kubernetes cluster if I had that many physical machines!

No. Docker is proprietary

Proprietary software should NOT be taught in schools! We already have way too much of that

+1