It sounds like your goal is a headless server for running various services on? If that’s the case, I’d stick with a well supported, mainstem LTS distro. Rocky Linux (RHEL9) or Ubuntu Server is where I’d start.

Typical software stack for me is Cockpit (bare metal management), Nginx Proxy Manager, and Portainer CE.

If your system has a decent amount of memory, >32GB, ZFS in a raidz2 configuration for storage. Keep in mind that if you go the ZFS route that it’s memory hungry by design.

For backup software, I ended up going with Restic but there are plenty of good solutions out there. Just make sure that you have one.

Hopefully this gives you an idea where to start looking. Ultimately it comes down to a lot of research, realizing there are a lot of valid ways to go about this, and then choosing the one that makes the most sense to you.

Is the drive totally dead? Curious what SMART would report.

My gut feeling is that it’s probably cheaper to buy a replacement m.2 than the hours of time to get netboot working but it could be a fun project!

Any progress on the plans for a native Linux client or Web Interface? Last I checked there was only a Windows client available (although it could be ran within proton to be fair).

While Windows is no doubt the popular gaming OS ATM, I think you’ll find a much higher population of Linux users amongst the self-hosted crowd.

Your service is exactly what I want for my GOG library, so I’d love to give it a spin!