until you can no longer log on with just a local Account. or your Data gets backed up for you anyway. Enshittification is one exec decision away

you could try mailu. that should be simple and Provide you with everything You need

I switched from ububtu to fedora kde about a year ago. really solid for gaming and the differences are not that big.

for work I also use debian and it is really cool to be able to understaand deb and “enterprise linux”(fedora/suse) differences

use haproxy instead of Port forwards, that should work just fine and works really well on opnsense

debian. stable, reliable, easy to learn