Roots of Chaos series is great and seems to fit these criteria. (The Priory of the Orange Tree, A Day of Fallen Knight, Among the Burning Flowers).

I have an older nvidia card (1070) and had more of an issue than that getting the correct version of the driver installed for my card, and getting it to use the correct driver instead of the open source one that didn’t work well. It’s also possible I was doing something wrong. But yeah, it’s definitely doable, and it’s not too bad, but it’s fiddly compared to the ubuntu driver gui or something like bazzite that works out of the box with it.

Yeah, I probably wouldn’t buy a new laptop for a server, but it’s a great way to re-use what would otherwise be e-waste. I have a 20 year old laptop running as a server, currently just for FoundryVTT, but it works great. 4GB of DDR2 ram, Intel celeron dual core cpu. I stuck a new ssd in it (old hdd died) and it works great, as long as I don’t run any graphical interfaces while I have the server running. One ram stick was bad, but DDR2 cost me about $11. Total hardware cost was around $50 USD.

Thinking about just removing the lid entirely, since I don’t use it graphically (I can hook up a monitor if absolutely needed).

I have used gnome, plasma, and xfce and they are all fine. I prefer KDE personally but they’re all going to do what you need to do. It’s all down to personal aesthetic preference, and picking one won’t hinder you in any real way. KDE to me just looks super nice out of the box for my taste, and I like the customization.

I love Debian. Been using it on my laptop for over a year. Some specific drivers are a little fiddly if you have nvidia graphics but it’s not too bad, lots of good info on the debian wiki.

My 8 and 9 year old kids use xubuntu on a 2013 macbook air. They use it for writing stories, making a lot of pixel art with Piko Pixel, and some code block style programming with Lego Spike. They are learning about multi-user systems, file management, etc. I’m keeping an eye out for a cheap pc that can run Minecraft (lots of those right now since people are just trashing old win 10 machines) because the older kid wants to learn how to make Minecraft mods.