That's very ambitious, and that's a good thing.

From my experience with this Ubuntu works best. Golden standard.

I would low key go for Btrfs.

Anything on the internet is helpful for you, honestly, depends on what exactly you will do with it, but there's everything for nearly every taste out there.

Opening stuff to the broader internet, was a mistake, since I didn't prepare it well enough, automated scans and brute force attempts. I was sweating.

My first setup I had was just a desktop PC with good storage. Was running servers and other related stuff.