What’s the use case? Is there a reason that the disk is not unlocked at boot/login?

I think any distro will do really. I’d go for something that is friendly to new users, if you’re not very familiar with Linux in general. For example: Linux Mint. Here is an example on how you can get your installation setup easily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyT4wfz5ZMg

Regarding your Valve Index. It will likely work, but don’t expect it to be very easy to get it running well. I’m currently on Arch Linux with red team hardware and a Valve Index. For example, you will need to ensure the udev rules are set properly: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-devices. New issues occasionally arise, see: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues. Currently, it’s not switching audio devices automatically, so I use pavucontrol (with PipeWire) to switch that manually.

Oh I didn’t know that yet! Amazing stuff.

You’re in luck. As far as i recall wincompose is inspired by Xorg’s Compose feature (https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose?tab=readme-ov-file#features). Depending on your installation you can toggle it via some settings, or by running: setxkbmap -option compose:ralt

I always find the book useful for this stuff: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg/Keyboard_configuration#Configuring_compose_key

That should be easily solved with: sudo apt install curl

I think that should be possible. You’ll likely need to get Jellyfin running with that cloudflare tunnel. There are probably alternatives to cloudflare tunnel as well, but I’m not very familiar with it. I believe there are some limitations with the tunnel, so you will have to check that out. Otherwise there should be no issue.

Dozens of GB sounds like there’s a lot of media files to me. I’d not share that via Syncthing. Assuming that is correct: Wouldn’t a media server like Jellyfin be a better fit? Or if it’s photos, I recommend Immich. Note that Immich is under active development and should not be your only place to store photos.

I think self-hosted cloud is a vague statement, but I think with your network infrastructure you will be limited in what you can do. I think cloudflare tunnel could be a good option for getting the device available online.

Then the self-hosted part. There are so many things you can look into. You can run everything in Docker, install the software you want directly on your laptop, and much more.

You’ll likely also need a reverse proxy. Can use nginx proxy manager, traefik, or something similar for that.

What are your goals with the self-hosted cloud? That would help you in making it easy to find resources and others here to give you advice.

Edit: typo’s

Well… I guess I have been living under a rock. Today is the first time to have heard of info. I have been using man for well over 2 decades now.

It’s very difficult for me to work through these logs as they are missing new lines.

But there is plenty of stuff giving errors:

Aug 20 14:07:08 blackcloud gnome-session-binary[635]: Unrecoverable failure in required component org.gnome.Shell.desktop

Aug 20 14:07:08 blackcloud org.gnome.Shell.desktop[646]: Failed to setup: No GPUs found

Aug 20 14:07:08 blackcloud gdm[398]: Gdm: GdmDisplay: Session never registered, failing Aug 20 14:07:08 blackcloud gdm[398]: Gdm: Child process -628 was already dead.

Aug 20 14:08:08 blackcloud /usr/lib/gdm-wayland-session[2472]: dbus-daemon[2472]: [session uid=120 pid=2472] Activated service ‘org.freedesktop.systemd1’ failed: Process org.freedesktop.systemd1 exited with status 1

Aug 20 14:08:25 blackcloud gnome-shell[2483]: Connection to xwayland lost Aug 20 14:08:25 blackcloud gnome-shell[2483]: Xwayland terminated, exiting since it was mandatory Aug 20 14:08:25 blackcloud org.gnome.Shell.desktop[2483]: GNOME Shell terminated with an error: Xwayland exited unexpectedly

You might want to try (in no specific order) to check why xwayland is failing, reinstall gnome, clean up old configuration, do a system upgrade, try pacdiff.

I have not experienced this and no direct solution. You should probably check your logs to see what’s wrong. So on boot, try to log in into Wayland, then open up a shell and run these to see which errors pop up.

journalctl -b | grep wayland
journalctl -b | grep gnome
journalctl -b | grep gdm
# and for more general errors
journalctl -b -p 3

You might also want to check the book on Wayland.

I case you want to try it out, the setting I’ve used in Steam was:

RADV_PERFTEST=rt VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 %command%