If your computer has 4+ cores/threads and 8GB or more of ram, I'd set up a virtual machine to test it out.
Linux itself works just fine for anything, but it's different. There's a learning curve and you might find that the thing you need to do immediately has a different process than what you're used to, or needs some setting up first. There's also always formatting differences between word and libreoffice writer (same can be said for different versions of word), and some higher level excel things that aren't easy or not possible in calc.
Lawyers are most definitely not under oath in the courtroom. They are under scrutiny of the bar association if they get way out of line, but lawyers can pretty much say whatever they want. It's up to the opposing counsel to object and the judge to keep shit from going off the rails.
You put that with everything else similar into a folder, which is backed up. Mine is called "Files". If there's something in there that I don't need backed up. It still gets backed up. If there's something very large in there that I don't need backed up, it gets removed in one of my "oh shit these backups are huge" purges.
Also, mammals evolved around 300 million years ago, and being generous, clothes were first used 3 million years ago. So the number of generations of your ancestors who didn't see tiddies everyday is a rounding error to the number who did. And they were ALL successful vaguely waves in your direction
That's all handled with adding the x-systemd.automount option to my fstab entry. If it disconnects it's unmounted, when it's available again it mounts when something tries to access it.
I have occasionally needed to restart some services if they didn't like getting disconnected, but as far as mounting goes it's handled pretty smoothly with that option.
I brought my 2003 laptop back to life for shits and giggles recently. It's made me realize how bloated software has become. It's still just as usable as it was 20 years ago when you remove all the fancy crap and use programs designed for tasks rather than living in a web browser. Sure its not fast, but once I replaced the spinning drive with an ssd, it became pretty damn usable in a modern day scenario. I really thought I would just upgrade as far as I could for fun, then slap an old archived distro on there from my college days for some good old PTSD/nostalgia. But it's actually usable so I occasionally pull it out and do stuff on it. I'm ready to slap jaunty jackalope on it and relive going to my uni's library to write a 10 page research paper thats due the next day, but it's still ready to rock in modern times.
Do you mean a hang on boot when trying to mount? For that I use the nofail option in fstab. I also use the x-systemd.automount option so if something is not mounted for whatever reason, it tries to mount it when something attempts to access it.
I've found that around 70% of my connection's max upload speed is the sweet spot for keeping things speedy, but I only do that if I want something fast and there aren't many seeders. I typically download at 20% of my bandwidth and upload at 10% so when it's rocking I don't affect anyone else on my network. I don't have symmetrical up-down so my upload limit is a little above 10% of my download limit.
I have a wait-for-ping service that pings nas A, once it gets a successful response it tries to mount.
I lifted it from a time when I needed to ping my router because Debian had a network-online service bug. I adapted it to my nas because the network-online issue eventually got fixed and mounting my shares became the next biggest issue.
It seems like this person might have grabbed that same fix for what I eventually did because our files are...oddly almost exactly the same.
I'm not great at any init things, but systemd has made my home server stuff relatively seamless. I have two NASs that I mount, and my server starts up WAY faster than both of them, and I (stupidly) have one mount within the other. So I set requirements that nasB doesn't mount until nasA has, then docker doesn't start until after nasB is mounted. Works way better than going in after 5 minutes and remounting and restarting.
Of course, I did just double my previous storage on A, so I could migrate all of Bs stuff back. But that would require a small amount of effort.
They could have easily quoted something for a proper x-pass data wipe, or cost a of a new drive and destruction service, plus a cyber security consulting fee. I would be surprised if it wouldn't hold up at least a little bit in court (I know very little in the way of dutch courts) but if your response is "this is the proper way to destroy data, if you actually want it securely wiped I'll need you to foot this bill, otherwise it's hitting my recycle bin". But there's probably some details missing of this guy being a complete dick to get an officer to want to do paperwork over it.
And yet I need 2GB of free ram and a 4 core processor to browse the web.