Arch installs aren't too bad, it's the post-install setup that'll get you though since a fresh install is guaranteed to detonate if you don't disarm it.
It doesn't even have to be complex anymore thanks to archinstall.
Really depends on what you want your system to be, if you want a lightweight system choose a barebones distro like Arch, Gentoo, Void or any server spin such as Fedora Server. Then, during installation you only get what you need. If you are going lightweight you'd probably want something like Sway WM, Hyprland or XFCE.
If you don't care for minimalism, then choosing a distro focused on a graphical interface such as Fedora Workstation will be much better for you, since that distro will be maintained with the idea of users using whatever DE it is, the distro maintainers probably contribute to upstream of the DE too. Support will also be easier since you'll find that these distros, while maybe having smaller communities, those communities ask more questions and get more solutions due to the Linux inexperience.
I'm a Proton slave, all my eggs are in their basket so I'll go ahead and provide some free marketing for them. ProtonVPN is pretty good since it's ran by a good company that cares about you, getting Port Forwarding setup on Linux is a bit of a chore but I believe they're working on automating it, the Windows app does have it automated already by the way.
I do worry about the long-term practicality of ProtonVPN because of this manual process, since as far as I can tell there's no way to automatically hand your assigned port to the torrent client...
I use Hetzner exclusively and have just one complaint. You don't get much choice as to where your VPS is hosted country-wise nor the OS it runs. You do get the standard list of options, as you would with any other provider, except that list is quite small on Hetzner. It's good enough, I use Fedora everywhere and they support that so I'm good. Anyway, it's obviously free to create an account so there's no risk in case your setup isn't supported.
Apart from that, they're brilliant. The web console is nice, clean and well-designed, great value (1TB of storage clocks in at a few euros/month), room to scale and a decent company. Can't comment on customer support since I've never needed it.
For the services you've specified, that'll run you maybe 3 - 4 euros a month (that's with automatic backups of your entire server + tax) since you can run all of that under one server.
Printing flip-books for the videos and keeping that in essentially a time-capsule. With a vacuum if you can afford it. Not perfect but will definitely last for hundreds of years. Look at the Magna Carta for inspiration.
For the audio, vinyl and kept in an even stronger container, instruct everyone to use gloves before touching it.
I ran SSHFS for a while maybe half a year ago? I quite liked it cause we obviously already use SSH so setup was quick and easy, performance was good too. Then I learnt it's no longer maintained so switched to NFS.
NFS is good, if you aren't accessing from Windows I would go for that. Setup is pretty simple too, just change /etc/exports and a few permissions or ownerships (after installing the package obviously) then start the systemd service.
Can't comment on Kerberos, but considering NFS popularity I can't imagine it being difficult.
Seriously, I'm not a heavy software developer that partakes in projects of that scale nor complexity but just seeing it from the outside makes me hurt. All these protocols left-right and center, surely just an actual program would be cleaner? Like they just rewrite X from scratch implementing and supporting all modern technology and using a monolithic model.
Then small projects could still survive since making a compositor would almost be trivial, no need to rewrite Wayland from scratch cause we got "Waykit" (fictional name I just thought of for this X rewrite), just import that into your project and use the API.
I've used it for VR, which is the only thing I keep Windows for. It's pretty good however I'd say having experience with Linux is a good idea, I definitely wouldn't treat it as a drop-in silver bullet for Windows minimalism (if such a thing exists).
By the sounds of it you're inexperienced with OS-hopping, so if you're going to start looking for things like this just do it properly and give Linux a go. You'll learn so much more and get a much nicer experience at the end, then if you decide you still need Windows then go and use someone else's computer to make a USB. I wouldn't bother trying to make one on Linux, it hardly ever works in my experience.
For clarity, I now just debloat vanilla Windows 11 with Chris Titus' tool. Still only used for VR and Game Dev.
If you go with Atlas, just know you're putting your whole system into the hands of a team smaller than most Linux distros that's doing more work than all of them, so I doubt Atlas is going to be around for much longer. Whereas something like Debian, Mint or Pop! is here to stay.
There's also far less chance of your system breaking if you go with Linux. Really in this situation there is absolutely zero reason to not go the extra mile and hop to desktop freedom.
I've got it downloading non-real time right now cause I was able to fix the Opus issue (PR is open on Github "Effective libopus support"), so I want to stress-test my changes a bit.
I'll switch it back to real-time soon, and I'll turn on the archive :P.
Thank you! Seems like Opus doesn't work though which is a shame. I made an issue on the Github page. I'll make a script to do that after and preserve the cover art.
I've now got it going with real-time downloads, this is going to take days 😭. However this tool is the best out of a set of compromises so I'll make the most of it.
Arch installs aren't too bad, it's the post-install setup that'll get you though since a fresh install is guaranteed to detonate if you don't disarm it.
It doesn't even have to be complex anymore thanks to
archinstall.