At the start I just wanted a desktop machine that runs Steam through sunshine/moonlight so hardware support and gaming stuff such was very important.

My homelab used to run on my laptop when it could all fit within a couple 100s of GB and I was the only user but moving it was tricky. Since I'm a programmer I'm not afraid of this stuff so I just spent the hours to figure out one problem at a time.

I ended up figuring out adding HDD whitelist in SELinux, make it accessible in podman, manually edit fstab because tools didn't work, systemd service for startup, logging in automatically where I already forgot everything and would have not had to do any of this on a bog standard Ubuntu server.