Come to Spain, we have everything

Well, you're already on a Debian based distro and not Ubuntu. Let it do it's thing in the most boring way :D

This is the future we were promised, dumb machines doing work 24/7. I'd change it to Debian but you stick with whatever works best for you.

Debian runs on most cloud servers, it's pretty secure. The outdated packages refer mostly to apps, which is the reason why Debian is so stable. No frills and boring. Documentation is plenty on the internet and for server space it's probably the most compatible OS.
I'm running Debian 11, kernel 6.10 on Odroid. Arch on my desktop.

Keep replying, be civil and people will engage with you. Most of us switched to Mastodon to avoid engagement algorithms

I don't think that just by having an AMD card would solve your issue. Granted that with AMD there's hardly any setup required.

I also pay for it and watch it on my android TV. And I completely agree with you. But for now it's my main source of TV and I mainly follow channels I subscribe. I don't listen to music on YT, i do follow some live music channels

I would stick with SMB and SSH(SFTP). SMB for content sharing and accessible on any device like PCs or phones. SSH, which includes SFTP, for accessing everything else on the server.

Security starts first with you. Most of the attacks are done though social engineering. Email phishing, dodgy webpage logins. Normal password security behaviour should fine for you to use the pc. More importantly, what is the distro you're using? Maybe consider using Flatpaks for the apps, they tend to offer more restrictions on access to the system. (Installing the torrent app as a Flatpak and only give it permissions to a specific folder) One of things I tend to do is install chromium just to login on my Google apps, Gmail, YT. But I'm more of a non data sharing freak.

I work on IT support and all of our clients use enterprise. It's not just the Ads.
Microsoft has slowly been dumbing down it's apps and the OS. Removing features that where good for office users.
Access to settings is a joke. It's a bad OS. I fell like they've gone backwards, again.
My pet peeve right now is why can't the taskbar be placed on the sides? It had that functionality before.

Hardware issues have been fading more and more. Just recently saw a small survey in a Linux channel with about 1000 responses. And about 50% retired no issues with hardware plus a lot more that only had 1 issue (there are still some vendors who don't offer compatibility like AMD or Intel). So most people don't actually need to download drivers, it's all in the kernel.

Have a look at this.
https://pine64eu.com/product/pinetime-smartwatch-sealed/

You can see the specs and get the idea of what you might need