I’ve got Proxmox running on a nvme mirror. Two HDDs are passed to Turnkey Linux mediaserver; they are mirrored with BTRFS and act as storage. I am satisfied with all (prox, turnkey, btrfs) and would recommend.

I had one BTRFS drive fail, and replacing it with no experience took about an hour.

I do wish there was better user documentation for WebDAVcgi, the WebDAV frontend in Turnkey linux mediaserver.

mediaserver comes with Samba, so I use that to connect devices like phone or laptop to the server

Turnkey’s mediaserver was my replacement for Openmediavault with Filebrowser plugin. Filebrowser creates an internal user to write files for anything uploaded via web interface, so if you mount the folder later via NFS, the permissions don’t match. Openmediavault would stall or crash a lot as a container and especially as a VM, but maybe it runs better on bare metal.

Authpass. Store offline or in their cloud. Works on multiple types of devices. Has autofill

Pretty much. But if you need to test it, you can buy another drive and install linux and your games there. If it doesn’t work, you can use the extra drive for something else.

In Steam on Linux, use settings to enable Experimental or Proton for Windows games.

Edit: This is computer science, you must report your findings!

Here are some tips once you have chosen:

You can change your desktop environment later.

If you do your install with seperate partitions for /home and others, leave 10% unallocated. Also make /bin about 15gb and /boot about 1.5gb. When you eventually run out of space, you can use KDE Partition manager to add the unallocated space to the partition you need, even if you set up encryption (gparted doesn’t play well with encryption). You can install Partition manager as a package, you don’t need to use KDE Plasma.

Using a drive mirror is a good idea. Maybe use it the second time you install.

If you want to use a cool filesys like zfs, just use btrfs for now (licensing issues). Ext4 will also work for desktop user needs.

If you go with Debian, you can add repos to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. But it is a one-way trip, so before adding sid, consider running your program in a vm. Non-free non-free-firmware and contrib are fine