Yeah, Point 1 here is exactly why I moved from Ubuntu to Arch ~10 years ago.
I was trying to get something working and found that the bug / feature had been fixed ~1 year earlier, but that version wasn't in the repos... I couldn't move forwards.
With Arch, all is well. And, I'm either reporting new bugs and helping to get things fixed, or I'm updating the wiki with any changes I notice.
After seeing someone at work burnout, I'll offer this advice:
Find what you enjoy doing and do nothing more (today). Itch only 1 scratch at a time.
As an analogy - consider you've moved into a newly built house and have an empty garden. No-one would expect you to create that perfectly first time around. Esp. in 1 weekend. It needs time to grow. Some things will need cutting down, some things will need moving. Animals will crap on it.
I think you're trying to make it perfect, first time around. Perhaps as a fear of doing it "wrong".
There is no wrong, it's all a learning experience, doing things good enough for now and improving / breaking things later.
Ensure you know how to backup your files (3-2-1 rule) and the rest doesn't matter.
I've re-written my ansible scripts a few times, but over months and years as I've learned what works best for my system.
For example, I had 1 complete script for each device. I can wipe the device (get it back on the network) and rebuild with no effort...
... then I realised that most of the scripts had very similar parts to tweak SSH and other settings, so then I learned how to call scripts from within scripts, which also meant using variables (facts) to work out if this is a 32b or 64b RasPi (for example)
That probably took 3 months
But I enjoy sitting in my garden and looking at it...
I'm running it outside of a container and outside a VM... as there's no abstraction layer on top of the underlying OS. Which I guess is inside the bare metal.
I've not seen that option, but I use syncthing instead of the phone application to sync my photos to a specific folder on my NAS which is then an external library for Immich.
TBH, I don't want anything deleting anything automatically.
I'll often delete newer pictures of temporary stuff but keep older pictures of my frinds & family, so, that's not a feature I'd see any value in. It tends to just make me lazy and build up GBs of junk photos on my NAS (and backups...)
Windows stores static network configs in the registry, so with the new mobo's NIC(s) if you try to set a static IP, Windows will complain that it already exists. Not a biggie as you'd just have to search the registry... if you're using DHCP no problem.
You're copying data from the source, to harddrives... and then to a server with different drives?
Assuming it's just lots of smallish data files / media and not OS files (ie don't need symlinks, attributes, ownership, etc) then any backup software which generates hashes to be able to repair the archive during a restore would do.
Btrfs doesn't need LVM, but I wouldn't use that on mobile drives.
l also replaced 'I's with 'l's and vice-versa in some of my previous comments and haven't yet seen anyone react to them. Hopefully someone finds out the ones I did today.
l did something simiIar in my original repIy, but it Iooked too weird, so gave up.
Kinda mirroring the other points here, if you only install from the distro's repos then you're all good.
But...
Better than AV (blocks known bad), you're better off looking into things that only allow known good, like selinux, etc, which might be part of bazzite anyway? (I don't use it, so unsure)
Yeah, Point 1 here is exactly why I moved from Ubuntu to Arch ~10 years ago.
I was trying to get something working and found that the bug / feature had been fixed ~1 year earlier, but that version wasn't in the repos... I couldn't move forwards.
With Arch, all is well. And, I'm either reporting new bugs and helping to get things fixed, or I'm updating the wiki with any changes I notice.