Many DNS providers offer privacy options. They’ll put their own information in the WHOIS database and forward relevant stuff to you.

Just put it on a USB stick. No install, no commitment. Baby steps.

I’ve got Jellyfin running on an odroid, and it’s pretty solid.

Not sure if you’re the type to need access to your home network while away, but I also use a pi zero as my “login gateway”–I forward just port 22 to it from the WAN, and I have ssh set up to only allow logins with a key. I can set up dynamic port forwarding and tunnel through to my home network, and that pi zero has no other function (so even if I screw something else up on another server, I can still access my network).

Typically a web browser or dedicated app, but it’s open source so there are options. You might be able to stream directly with VLC, not sure.

Not sure if it supports all of that, but yt-dlp is my go-to.

It depends on the way you like to learn.

If you like to play around with things and look things up as you need, go with a beginner-friendly distro (Mint, ElementaryOS, and Pop!OS are all good options). This gives a more immediate payoff (in that there are lots of fun things to experiment with right away), but you’ll learn things kinda piecemeal.

If you like to learn by reading first, then starting with the absolute minimum and gradually working your way up, something like Arch might be great for you. It’s a much slower process and has a much steeper learning curve, but if you have the discipline for it, you’ll come out with a really solid understanding of how things work.

Most people start with something simple, and venture into the more intimidating waters when they feel comfortable. If you’re not sure, try Mint and go from there. You can always wipe it and install Arch later (if you don’t have anything important on this laptop, you can try lots of different ones without worrying about migrating or losing anything).

The answer also depends on your level of experience and how much you want to learn doing this. You mentioned you haven’t done this before, but are you otherwise comfortable using computers and figuring things out? Are you familiar with Linux and/or the command line? In addition, are you hoping to tinker around and learn a lot from this, or are you more concerned with just setting it up so you can use it?

There are options for all levels of expertise and technical interest, but I recommend starting with any hardware you already have or can aquire for cheap/free (especially if you’re hoping to tinker and learn more). As another commenter suggested, finding an old desktop or laptop and putting a NAS operating system on it would be a great starting project. Then once you play around with it, you’ll know if/where you want to spend some cash on something better. If you don’t have old PCs laying around, check on whatever you use for local buy & sell listings, you can probably pick up something for pretty cheap.

If you’re mostly looking to play around and you don’t have any extra hardware, you can also try things out in a virtual machine (download VirtualBox), which will let you learn without any monetary investment.

I’m using my old desktop from 2010. There’s no such thing as a server that can “do it all”, but any computer from the last 10 years would probably be a fine place to start. The more you do, the more likely you’ll be to hit some sort of performance limit, and by that time you’ll know more about what you actually want.

In short, find old cheap/free hardware and start playing around.

If you feel most familiar with Debian, I recommend looking at Mint. It has great compatibility and is otherwise easy to use, and it handles GPUs well (including Nvidia). In terms of hardware, I’ll agree with the others here–used is the way to go, you’ll get a lot more for your money than buying new.

That being said, you can also look for clearance and/or refurbished PCs. This one would probably be powerful enough.

Doubtful. Without Linux running the majority of the internet, I doubt the desktop scene would look the same as it does today.

I’m not an expert, but any time I’ve needed to do this, I set up my own router as a client to the parent router, and I set my router (client) as the DMZ in the parent router. Effectively you end up with two routers that are both (more or less) connected directly to the internet, without the two networks messing with each other. It’s also minimally invasive to the parent router (even old stock firmware has always had a DMZ option).

The tricky part then is using the wireless connection as your “WAN port,” rather than a physical one. In which case, as long as you can install OpenWRT on it, you should be fine.