Businesses around here are constantly selling old rack and standing servers on Craigslist. $50 ish on up depending on age and configuration, just have slap some drives in them. I set one up with ZoneMinder and some cheap poe IP cameras for my house. Works great and shrinks the ewaste pile a little bit.

Many ISPs block some traffic on those ports for residential customers in order to force you to use a much more costly business account to be able to host your own website.

You can definitely support more pixels than 1080p, even at 165hz. My kid has a 6700 xt and I’m constantly impressed with it at 2k 165. Worst case you can run at 1080 and upscale.

I personally (I’m sure others will disagree) would recommend skipping Manjaro and maybe Pop.

If you want to try Arch based pick Endeavor instead of Manjaro.

It seems like new folks have a lot of trouble with Pop to me. Out of the Ubuntu-based side I’d choose Mint over the rest.

Also don’t discount base Debian, people sneer at it because of the speed of the update cycle but the other side of that is it being the least likely to blow up on a new user.

Full disclosure: My devices are currently split between endeavor and Debian, depending on my tolerance for things breaking. I know fuck all about Bazzite/Nobara/Fedora.