Everyone else mentioned most of what I would suggest.

One is missing for your original problem. Localsend. Think airdrop but cross platform. Super useful if you have a mix of devices (iOS, android, windows, etc…)

I keep it holy with Emacs

I can second this. Photosync works very well. Although i had to use an external library on immich so that photosync can directly send files to that folder.

Haha yes. Well perhaps stock up before the ban goes into effect?

I second mikrotik. I was an OpenWRT guy and still have some access points using OpenWRT but mikrotik routers are just so slick and easy to use and maintain. I would recommend also

Excellent, they live up to their name

Dare i ask if this is just another flavor of linux?

I used to keep a backed up base image to reflash a corrupted sd card. But after the 3rd or 4th time i knew i had to find a better solution.

I eventually moved to docker on the pi. But the pi would randomly go down. I had two of them for redundancy but eventually one of them ended up corrupting its sd card and shortly later the other went down unexpectedly while i was at work and the whole family lost connection without knowing how to fix it.

Decided to move to to dns blocking on the router. Basically its easy to reboot for the family and has yet to fail (more than a year now).

I like it but just not on a Pi. I found it too unstable. I found it easier to host in a docker container.

Although these days i just use blocklists on my router.

Im pretty appimage is stable to use on your system. It contains all of the dependencies inside of it. Just one file for all of its needs. Only issue that ive had is that you need to manually update them (ie download the newest version).

Hahah very true

I stopped dual booting windows 10 just because it kept messing up my boot loader when it performed certain updates

Also i dont believe its open source as requested. Although openwrt can be flashed on some models

They are excellent