Something I've been wanting to work on is a TUI wizard for configuring software.
The thought is most Linux server program use various config files, and in order to configure them correctly it generally takes a few minutes to a few hours to read through their documentation. But a lot of the configuration boils down to passwords/keys, file paths, network locations, a few different booleans, etc.
So the general idea is, for a program, the developer or the community can provide a config file telling the TUI wizard what arguments the config file needs, and this one program can walk the end user through setup and generates the config files. This would reduce the amount of time hunting through documentation and reduce bugs due to typos or invalid choices.
It could go a step further and auto generate keys or passwords if needed, validate entries (ie if the config needs an IP it could make sure it's valid, etc)
Have you tried using a partition manager like gparted to wipe the windows partions?
Another thing is Dell has been doing an awesome (/s) thing lately where they have their disks configured as raid by default on their laptops. Try going into the bios and make sure raid is disabled and the SSD is set to AHCI
Proxmox has a virtual monitor in its web interface, so you can access the desktop of a virtual machine that way. It's a little clunky but works ok for quick configuration. Alternately you could remote desktop into the virtual machine.
Quicksync is a little more tricky. GPU pass through is a pain, and I'm not sure off the top of my head about that. You can Google "proxmox quicksync passthrough" and see if any solutions will work for you. There's a chance that all you would need to do is set the processor type correctly in the virtual machine settings, but I'm not sure.
I'd really like wikijs 3.0 to release. The current version is almost good, but 20 minutes into using it I found it missing a lot of features I was hoping for.
OP is looking to move away from Google. Immediately getting locked into a different, arguably more restrictive, platform isn't a solution.
Now in general:
Pros:
free (paid plan only?)
company will stay in business for a while
Cons:
subject to Apple's privacy policy
US based company, not great for privacy
locked into a different platform
Apple's walled garden ecosystem means long term use is questionable. Will Apple keep supporting 3rd party email clients in 1,3,5 years? Do they even support it now? Who knows?
Apple has control over your account. If they screw you over on an iPhone purchase and you do a credit card charge back on them (for any reason really) do they let you keep your account? Google doesn't
Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it's a complex problem and while they've made some improvements, it's slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
Plasma 6 is built using QT 6, currently plasma 5 is using QT5. This is a huge effort to move the code to the new version of QT but it brings many improvements behind the scenes. Once this is done a lot of the code is going to be cleaner and more maintainable, which should translate to a smoother user experience.
I highly recommend using heat-press inserts. They allow you to put a threaded hole pretty much anywhere. It makes designing much easier and the end result will be stronger.
Don't forget opnsense for router firmware