I used proxmox and have played a little with nix and guix, but simplest is just use debian, put /home on a separate logical partition from the system partition so you can reinstall the system without clobbering user files, and as people keep saying, backup early and often.

This seems to be different and is geared towards directly looking after other humans. Hactivism as I’m used to the term, can often be technocratic.

Simplest is use /etc/hosts to set up names, if there are just a few.

I’d say run a local imap server rather than dealing with the weirdness of storage shares across multiple OS’s.

Dang, FSF shop temporarily closed. https://shop.fsf.org/