If you are going to try out different distros is handy to have a usb stick with ventoy.

https://ventoy.net/en/index.html

Flash it once and then just copy isos to it for all the distributions you want to try out

Fedora is what I recommend people start with these days

Yeah, this. I’m a big fan of the “diagrams as code” things like d2, mermaid, plantuml, nomnoml and all that. Obsidian has render plugins too so you can easily visualize things.

I have an official netgate firewall and it runs pfsense+ However, when it comes time to replace it and upgrade to 2.5GB my next firewall will be running opnsense. I just don’t like the direction netgate has gone with their company decisions and I won’t be buying any more hardware from them. I don’t think you should either.

The Lorem ipsum is the best part.

Also most people don’t add monitors to their network diagrams. That’s just a flex.

+1 for tailscale

if your server supports ipxe you can boot from https://netboot.xyz/ without a usb stick