Artificially induced coma is pretty close, I guess.

You can build a smaller form factor, like mini or micro ATX, but you might have a harder time to switch motherboards.

Or at least streamline “forget”: dismember

Embrace the ban. Never look back.

I found Kanboard to be useful for managing my projects tasks. There is also a Gantt plugin that can be used to schedule tasks with an ergonomic UI.

You’re right to be reluctant to apply everything by hand. K3s has a built-in feature that watches a directory and applies the manifests automatically: https://docs.k3s.io/installation/packaged-components

This can be used to install Helm charts in a declarative way as well: https://docs.k3s.io/helm

If you want to keep your solution agnostic to the kubernetes environment, I would recommend that you try ArgoCD (or FluxCD, but I never tried it so YMMV).

Any modded app provided for free by some rabdom uploader is suspicious. You cannot blindly trust any platform. If you care about your privacy and your device’s security you should analyze the app’s content in depth or buy the app (or crack it yourself, but it usually means you need to buy the app first).

Longhorn is pretty easy to use. Garage works well too. Ceph is harder to use but provides both block and object storage (s3).