Set aside a few weekends and mess around distro hopping. Think of it as a small scientific study. Use what you determine to be the most comfortable with.
I suggest being clever in your partitioning keeping /home and any other areas personal to their own partition if not their own disks. If you want to experiment you lose nothing by wiping / and installing something else. Also, you should decide on an effective backup strategy.
If you wanted to go overboard, don't even make the server accessible publicly. Distribute keys to a Wireguard network that is accessible publicly. Mandate your players obtain keys from you to play.
I would not just default to exfat because it is "newer," it does have compatibility issues on non-windows systems. The implementations differ wildly.
Veracrypt. Make a file on your disk.
Don't want a storage file?
Make 2 partitions, put veracrypt portable exe on the first normal storage partition. (fat32 is likely ideal here) Second partition formatted with veracrypt.
I was born into a car centric society. So much so they design the places we live around them. Including dense residential far away from employment that requires transportation. Chop all attempts at decent public transit and now you have created a market of completely artificial demand. Which the law says cars must become more expensive. I have to have a car because of the awful design choices made by unqualified politicians past. Fuck the auto industry. They could have been out saviors by being the example of what union companies do but instead chose violence.
You asked a question and someone offered a suggestion you were not looking in the right place. Then you become incredulous at their suggestion and start asking a whole bunch of sarcastic questions implying relevancy.
How about you google you problem and figure it out? No one will help you with that attitude.
You monster.
Do it. I waited for release but it was smooth as butter before. It has some edge case issues but on the whole it's been better than staying on plasma 5.
You can restrict the size of the ramdisk so you do not end up killing processes. A large amount of ram is not mandatory.
tmpfs is the filesystem you are looking for. You can mount it like any other filesystem in /etc/fstab.
tmpfs /path/to/transcode/dir tmpfs defaults 0 0
They mostly don't own anything. Either a rich person or a company owns where they live.