Personally, I use Kodi for that. It works very well with minimal keyboard and no mouse (though it can handle both), so much so that I've run it for years using only an IR remote.

True, but SQLite is not recommended in production settings, and is quite often the source of Nextcloud slowdowns, in my experience. A dedicated DB is the first thing I recommend for a production Nextcloud instance.

Oh and to be clear, in this instance, "production" means "people depend on this", be that your family group, team/department, fraternal order, church group, etc. as opposed to "I'm just playing with this thing."

It's more because they provide an ONVIF interface or an RTSP stream that makes them self-hosting darlings. Them being Chinese white-labels and cheap is mainly a side-bonus.

What are your recommendations if not them?

'dd' works, but I prefer 'shred'. It does a DoD multi-pass shred by default, so I usually use 'shred -vn1z /dev/(drive)'. That gives output, does a one-pass random write followed by one-pass zero of the disk. More than that just wastes time, and this kinda thing takes hours on large spinners. I also use 'smartmontools' to run SMART tests against my drives regularly to check their health.

My daily driver is still a Dell XPS 13, 10th gen Intel i7, 16gb RAM and 500gb (nvm) SSD. I bought it referbed. I'm running Fedora 38 (Workstation) currently. Everything works but the fingerprint sensor (which I don't care about). It runs for hours as long as I'm doing "normal" stuff like browsing and writing. It runs so long that I get tired before it does. The only time the runtime suffers is if I'm cranking the cores (encoding, compiling, etc). No voodoo required, it just runs this way out of the box. Even the onboard firmware gets updated by fwupd.

The only oddity (to me) is that it's USB-C only (no A ports) so I carry a small dock if I need to plugin a normal USB device or network cable, but that's rare for me.

A named volume for the config directory for one.

BMW on the line for you, sir.

I've used both APC (via apcupsd) and EATON (via nut), both work great.

From the top of my head, compared to ext4: RAM use and the ability to shrink an FS if necessary. Oh, also I've used an EXT FS driver on a Windows host, but I've never seen one for XFS.

If you're (going to continue) using Office 365, you can use Evolution as an Outlook replacement. Evolution EWS rides OWA and ActiveSync protocols to give you email, calendars, contacts, notes, etc. I've used it for over a decade. It works very well once setup.

As for Android, there are several, including Outlook for Android (which is bloated and slow, being a Microsoft product), which I am forced to use because of our company SSO config.

If you're looking for an Office 365 replacement, I use Nextcloud for my personal stuff. It has files, contacts, calendars, notes, etc. If you install the OnlyOffice plugin, you get multi-user online document and spreadsheet editing. I use the DAVx5 connector to get (shared and personal) contacts, calendars, and tasks in my Android phone. It integrates into the environment so all calendars and contacts apps work automatically. It also automatically backs up pics/vids I take with my phone automatically.

I did too until I tried to use them. They lack several features that rooted containers have, and a lot of howtos take for granted. They're fine for very simple containers, but expect pain an suffering.

Windows still got 99 problems, but that bitch ain't one.