A DIY solution like your home server is great. I’m just adverse to recommending it to someone who need to ask such an open ended question here. A premade NAS is a lot more plug n play.

Personally I went with an ITX build where I run everything in a Debian KVM/qemu host, including my fedora workstation as a vm with vfio passthrough of a usb controller and the dgpu. It was a lot of fun setting it up, but nothing I’d recommend for someone needing advice for their first homelab.

I agree with your assessment of old servers, way too power hungry for what you get.

A simple way to ensure your selfhosting is easy to manage is to get a NAS for storage and then other device(s) for compute. For your current plans I think you’d get far with a Synology DS224+ (or DS423+ if you want more disk slots).
Then when the NAS starts to be not enough you can add an extra device for compute (a mini pc or whatever you want) and let that device use the NAS as a storage.
Oh and budget to buy at least one large USB Drive to use as a backup, even if your NAS runs a redundant RAID.

I also tend to fall back to Clonezilla. I don’t feel that the Rescuezilla GUI adds much.
Regarding compatibility both the latest Rescuezilla (since September 2024) and Clonezilla (Since July 2024) uses partclone 0.3.32 so they should once again be compatible.
https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/releases

Sweet, then you know what’s going on and solved it!

You might wanna try out if your distro is compatible with cockpit:
https://cockpit-project.org/
https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit

It gives you a webUI that you can use to check out logs and services (among other things) and makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot computer troubles where the machine starts but your GUI doesn’t.

On mastodon you can only add an account you follow to a list. They get notified when you follow them, not when they’re added to a list.

I don’t think you’ll find much use for more than 1 Gbit/s internet but if your desktop pc has a free pcie slot you can look at buying a 10Gbit/s pcie card and a 10Gbit/s network switch as your backbone for fun. You’ll rarely have use for it though.

I imagine you’re talking about bandwidth and that your 300MB is actually 300Mbit/s and all your Gs are Gbit/s.
The fastest ADSL I’ve heard of is 24Mbit/s downstream, aka ADSL2+/G.992.5. You don’t have ADSL.
I would guess that your “ADSL” is actually fiber and that your “Cable” is coaxial cable (same type that gives you cable tv).
If you wanna use more than 1Gbit/s your devices also need to support it. Even with WiFi 6 you will seldom reach 1Gbit/s so we’re talking CAT6 cables and a motherboard that supports at least 2.5Gbit/s.

If a clean install also fails then I would start considering hardware fault.
You could always check if you can boot Fedora Workstation with GNOME just in case but I think you should start looking for a replacement PC.

https://guide.munin-monitoring.org/en/latest/tutorial/getting-started.html#adding-a-node

There are some unofficial Nagios Docker setups, such as https://github.com/JasonRivers/Docker-Nagios
Here’s their configuration doc: https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagioscore/docs/nagioscore/4/en/configmain.html
It isn’t all that pretty, see some examples at https://sourceforge.net/projects/nagios/ , but it allows for email alerts, multiple hosts (including managed network devices) and monitoring CPU / Memory / Disk space.

I’ve only ever run it as a full VM so I can’t give much thought on the docker container.

Things that will make Linux more frustrating to test:
Laptops with dgpus, Desktops with Nvidia dgpus (though there are distros that solve that out of the box such as the https://nobaraproject.org created by the GloriousEggroll himself), Software inflexibility.
Personally I build my machines with AMD CPU and GPU to make linux sailing a bit more smooth.

If your main software applications won’t work in Linux and there are no substitutes available that are good enough then you will have a bad time trying Linux. It’s like having a screwdriver without torx bits when all you use is torx screws.

OOBE\Bypassnro:
That said, if your Windows-only need is running peripheral apps to configure them then a refurbished Windows 11 Pro PC (desktop or laptop) that you keep disconnected will do it for you. The last saved configuration profile is (almost) always stored in the peripheral itself.
The trick is to:
a) not connect it to the network when it asks for it and,
b) Press Shift+F10 and run the bypassnro script in the oobe directory. (OOBE\Bypassnro)
The Windows out of the box experience will restart and the network requirement will be gone, you can now install with a local user instead of a microsoft account.
It will still spy on you whenever you connect it to the network, but you don’t have to connect it now do you?

Things that make the experience hell even when you get it running:
Guides tricking people into running a full OS on an old USB-A Thumb Drive that doesn’t have the IO to handle it.

My recommendation:
Buy a refurbished Lenovo T14s Gen2 or Gen3 with AMD, such as https://www.target.com/p/lenovo-thinkpad-t14s-g2-14-laptop-amd-ryzen-5-16gb-ram-256gb-ssd-w11p-manufacturer-refurbished/-/A-93371454.
Try any and all distros you are curious about until you find one you wouldn’t mind running as your main OS.

Then either go Windows 11 Pro on your laptop again and run your linux distro of choice on the desktop,
or use the desktop as a pure gaming machine and do your privacy conscious stuff on the linux laptop.
If you love competitive online FPS games with kernel level anticheat then you’re stuck with the second option.
A third option is to refuse software that only works in Windows and go full Linux on your machines, but I understand that isn’t a reasonable option for everyone.

I think you’re gonna find that a hard task. There isn’t one universal directory where apps saves their configs and bin files. You’ll find some in ~/.config

All I can see in that is that your machine has an LTE SIM slot and that the LTE Modem isn’t supported. That shouldn’t stop you from booting.

Oh, and before trying fixes - make a backup of your precious files when booted in safe mode.

You can use the -b flag to get a specific boot sequence:
https://www.howtogeek.com/499623/how-to-use-journalctl-to-read-linux-system-logs/#reviewing-boot-messages

Sometimes it can help to filter by UID 1000:
https://www.howtogeek.com/499623/how-to-use-journalctl-to-read-linux-system-logs/#selecting-log-messages-by-data-fields

Other than that you can try to filter by KDE services, but as I run GNOME I’m not very familiar with their names. In the KDE forum a developer recommends using this for another problem:
journalctl --user-unit=plasma-plasmashell.service --boot 0 --no-pager
https://discuss.kde.org/t/black-screen-after-login-how-to-troubleshoot-plasma-desktop/1615/4

You can still get a solidly built Lenovo ThinkPad. You just have to ensure you get a T14s or X1 Carbon. Sadly the models that retain the magnesium and carbon fiber aren’t very fun to replace parts in.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14s-Gen-6-laptop-review-The-AMD-version-returns-with-the-Ryzen-AI-7-Pro-360.923414.0.html#c12325014

When you’ve booted in safe mode you can use journalctl to check what’s going on.
https://www.howtogeek.com/499623/how-to-use-journalctl-to-read-linux-system-logs/
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/journalctl.1.html

Just wanna shout out that Intel are supposed to have fixed their troubles with 13th and 14th gen cpus, I know Dell went out with a customer advisory in October to update the BIOS to fix said trouble.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262287/intel-13th-14th-gen-crash-raptor-lake-root-cause-fix

And Intel CPUs are great when it comes to transcoding just like the AMD X3D CPUs are king when it comes to gaming.

If you got another psu then that would probably be the simplest way to verify if its the psu or not.

Not a solution but maybe a workaround: Look into virtualizing Win11 with KVM/qemu. It immediately gets mote complex if your Win11 need the discrete GPU but is possible with vfio and pcie passthrough.