That would be awesome. I have a Dell Optiplex 7040 Micro that might be better suited for your needs after you play around with the big server. Maybe we could trade?

Depending on where you’re located I would happily pay for shipping.

If you don’t want it, I’ll take it off your hands. I have a rack designed for that kind of hardware and all of the infrastructure to fully support it.

I would recommend editing your fstab and use the USB drive’s UUID to mount it to a consistent location. That way, even if you reboot or disconnect the drive and the reconnect it to, say, a different USB port, it will always mount to the same mountpoint.

See this page from the arch wiki for more info.

is there a Linux… idk what to call it, type? OS? Thing??? that runs out of the box without me having to install additional software manually or at least automatic setup wizards

The word you are looking for is called a distribution, or distro for short.

I’m surprised no one else has mentioned Bazzite, which should be exactly what you’re looking for.

is there any specific hardware that works easier with Linux

An AMD GPU for sure. Nvidia drivers have come a long way, but they don’t generally behave as well out of the box like AMD.

Big laundry. I don’t even remember what the reason was. I guess I assumed I would remember like it was some sort of genius idea. Big laundry, big laundry, it’s crazy, I’m a crazy person.

Not from the US but currently living here. I would say the Disability Act is the gold standard worldwide. The amount of consideration for people with a variety of disabilities that almost universally applies is exceptionally amazing. It’s kind of shocking to see the dedication to adhering to that law while otherwise abandoning that portion of the population (e.g. Healthcare, SSDI, etc.).

True, but I was more thinking about the issue of reconnecting in general when you just nuked sshd.

Sure, I suppose as long as sshd is up and running in the ramdisk environment (which you mentioned in another comment, along with all other services) you could always reconnect. Very neat and clever!

What happens if the SSH session closes before dd finishes? Sounds pretty badass but I don’t think I would trust this approach in prod lol