Slicers for FDM are open source and lots of forks. The built-in printer profiles vary a lot but can be created from scratch. You can find lots online to use as examples too. I currently use Cura, Prusaslicer, and Orcaslicer.

I'm more interested in printing plastic than tuning/upgrading the printer itself so I recommend a printer with automatic z-offset and bed leveling. Basic maintenance tasks such as cleaning, oiling, and greasing will need to be done on occasion no matter the printer. Beyond that I've only done simple retraction tuning.

I started with Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro. Klipper firmware upgrade improved speeds a lot. It wasn't bad for a budget printer but lack of automatic z-offset can be frustrating so I replaced & gave it away to friend. Replaced it with Creality K1 which was a lot easier to get started with thanks to automatic z-offset calibration. Output quality is good but to get better would require upgrades + tuning. Been saving up to replace with Bambu Lab P1S combo so I can also do multi-color printing.

I swapped out delta fan a few months after release, agree fairly straightforward. Upgraded the nvme ssd to 1tb sometime before replacing with OLED model.

I've had good luck with refurbished Dell laptops. My primary laptop is a refurbished Dell Latitude 11" 3120. Bought it for ~$250 at beginning of this year and currently have Fedora on it. It's not very powerful. I use it primarily to browse the web, watch movies/tv, and vnc/ssh to my other systems. Can last about 5-6 hours streaming video from jellyfin at 50% brightness, other stuff barely uses any power and can stretch out to 9-10 hours if I set display brightness even lower.

I've always bought Windows laptops then put linux on them so I'm used to verifying that tools such as TLP are installed, configured, enabled, and working. There is too much variety with laptops for all of them to be handled automatically unfortunately so I always verify it. If a laptop came with Linux pre-installed then it might be good to go ootb but I'd still verify.

Quick way to check if a program is using hardware video acceleration is with a gpu top utility.

Intel - intel_gpu_top

Nvidia - nvidia-smi / nvtop

AMD - radeontop / nvtop / amdgpu_top (just did quick search, don't have any AMD powered on to verify)

For steamdeck on the couch something like the xreal or rokid would be better. Some people have been able to make VR work with steamdeck with bad performance but they only tried VR games so don't know how it would be with regular games.

I bought a pair when they were still going by NReal name and they worked well with steam deck and my laptop. Battery life would last longer with only the glasses on. I didn't like always having to wear contacts so picked up a pair of Rokid's glasses too. Those have built in diopters and have been working well.

The container method used should be whatever you are more familiar with or prefer. They both have their own quirks, pros, & cons.

SELinux - If you don't want to deal with SELinux then set it to permissive mode. If you want to keep in enforcing mode you need to create the appropriate policies, https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/using_selinux/configuring-selinux-for-applications-and-services-with-non-standard-configurations_using-selinux

Firewall - If you don't want it's protection then look up instructions to stop & disable it on your distro.

Port forwarding - From linux container side you either need to specify host networking or the ports you want to allow through, there is no avoiding that if it needs to be network accessible. If you want it internet accessible then you need to setup port forwarding on your router.

Have you looked into something like yunohost? It may be the kind of thing you're looking for.

I think there were some court cases in the US the HDD manufacturers won that allows them to keep using those stupid crap units to continue to mislead people. Been a minor annoyance for decades but since all the competition do it & no govt is willing to do anything everyone is stuck accepting it as is. I should start writing down the capacity in multiple units in review whenever buy storage devices going forward.

EndeavourOS on desktop and laptop side of things.

Yes, my order status has been at preparing to ship for awhile now. I been wanting a good Linux tablet to replace aging iPad and hoping this works well enough for me. I'll try to remember to update post on how I like it when it does arrive.

Was it the official container image or 3rd party? Whichever it was, they should get notified so that init script can get fixed to prevent similar happening to others.

Would love a new Steam Machine and could actually be good this time. Proton didn't exist when they released the original Steam Machines which limited you to linux ports of games. I had bought two but wiped & did clean installs of Windows 7 so we could play all the games wanted to.

Before Proton, gaming on linux relied on native ports or WINE. Native ports were rare & not always better. WINE took some learning to make work well but I dunno, never got any good at it.

I suggest to read up on the way Wake On Lan works, it's pretty neat. it has to send a packet to a local broadcast address. I don't think that can route over the internet so you need some device to send the packet from on the network or over a VPN connection.

For the KVM part, that model server should have some form of remote control. I think they called it the Integrated Management Module (IMM) on those things. The IMM is running as long as the server has power, it's a tiny independent system. They have various licenses/feature sets but at minimum it should get you a web interface to see status of the server as well as power it on & off. It may also have remote console and media options but those are add-on costs so not everybody buys them. The default login information should be somewhere on the chassis unless it was removed or got lost. The old defaults used to be username all uppercase 'USERID' with password exactly 'PASSW0RD' with a zero instead of the letter O. I don't recall when they changed to newer methods but it's worth a try.