My thoughts exactly. In Europe it’s part of our social welfare

Keep replying, be civil and people will engage with you. Most of us switched to Mastodon to avoid engagement algorithms

Yeah, but the form factor of the steam deck makes it more appealing if I want to set It up in the living room

Ok. I get it now. I’ve been trying to build something cheap as a Linux gaming setup and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m better off buying the steam deck.

I would stick with SMB and SSH(SFTP). SMB for content sharing and accessible on any device like PCs or phones. SSH, which includes SFTP, for accessing everything else on the server.

+1 for bazzite. And OP had already worked with fedora

Fedora atomic (I’m using bazzite for gaming only) have Flatpaks enabled by default and are recommended, so it integrates well with the OS.
And seeing where the Linux community is going right now, Flatpak has been widely adopted by most distros which are not Debian based. There are ways to go regarding the packaging for the developers, but there are plenty of apps already on flathub. I’m using it on arch and bazzite and have no problems so far.
I can’t comment on the apps the OP requires

Security starts first with you. Most of the attacks are done though social engineering. Email phishing, dodgy webpage logins. Normal password security behaviour should fine for you to use the pc. More importantly, what is the distro you’re using? Maybe consider using Flatpaks for the apps, they tend to offer more restrictions on access to the system. (Installing the torrent app as a Flatpak and only give it permissions to a specific folder) One of things I tend to do is install chromium just to login on my Google apps, Gmail, YT. But I’m more of a non data sharing freak.

I use it on my home server, TUI only, when I want to organise my files