Set aside a few weekends and mess around distro hopping. Think of it as a small scientific study. Use what you determine to be the most comfortable with.

I suggest being clever in your partitioning keeping /home and any other areas personal to their own partition if not their own disks. If you want to experiment you lose nothing by wiping / and installing something else. Also, you should decide on an effective backup strategy.

If you wanted to go overboard, don’t even make the server accessible publicly. Distribute keys to a Wireguard network that is accessible publicly. Mandate your players obtain keys from you to play.

👏👏

I would not just default to exfat because it is “newer,” it does have compatibility issues on non-windows systems. The implementations differ wildly.

Veracrypt. Make a file on your disk.

Don’t want a storage file?

Make 2 partitions, put veracrypt portable exe on the first normal storage partition. (fat32 is likely ideal here) Second partition formatted with veracrypt.

Time for a new one 😡

You can restrict the size of the ramdisk so you do not end up killing processes. A large amount of ram is not mandatory.

tmpfs is the filesystem you are looking for. You can mount it like any other filesystem in /etc/fstab.

tmpfs /path/to/transcode/dir tmpfs defaults 0 0

I transcode to ramdisk.

No, please no. I can’t be tortured like that again…

You win.