

I don’t know about your first need (“MergerFS”) but if you find useful, I have an old Intel NUC 6i3SYH (i3-6100U) with 16Gb RAM and I was running with Windows 10 for Plex+Arr and also HomeAssistant in VirtualBox. I was running into issues until I switched to Proxmox. Now I’m running Proxmox to run Docker with a bunch of containers (plex+arr and others) and also a virtual machine which has HomeAssistant and everything was smooth. I have to say that there is a learning curve, but it’s very stable.
+1. It’s like an IRC channel but improved and easy to use.
When I started in the online games, we used IRC + TeamSpeak. Now we only use Discord since it has all of them in only one app but it’s better (except the ads), easier and you also has a Mobile App.