Tailscale is the best with netbird in a close second if you want to self host, headscale works great.

~/repos

Immich is the best photo solution I have used and has been really easy to setup. Nextcloud apps are usually ok but usually have a more specialized alternative

I want to try alpine out but the lack of systemd support is a blocker since I don’t want to add openrc support to all my Ansible playbooks that rely on systemd services and timers

My open source observability project could use some help https://gitlab.com/shiftsystems/shiftmon

You can edit the /etc/fstab or setup systemd mounts so all the files are mounted at the correct spot at startup. Different drives are mounted to folders on Linux instead of drive letters like on windows. Before you reboot, make sure everything works by running mount -a otherwise you will have to rescue the system

If your Linux distro is using btrfs you can format it to btrfs and use btrfs send for backups. Otherwise the filesystem shouldn’t be to big if a deal unless you want to restore files from a Windows machine. If that is the case use ntfs