Pretty much exactly what hot mud is. 😀

I learned about this years ago when I pulled into a McDonalds at midnight for coffee. Guy said they didn’t have any made but would make a pot, and that me buying the cup of coffee paid for the whole large pot.

Hard drives, especially spinning discs, and RAM are probably the biggest factor at idle. I dropped my servers’ idle draw from 220w to 180w by dropping it’s RAM and replacing some older drives.

I’ve been pretty happy with Garuda Linux, Arch based. You’d be fine with near any of them though. Fedora base is amazing and stable and as well as the Arch based systems I use.

In the end it comes down to your hardware and what kind of gaming you want to do.
AMD gpus seem to work the best next with Intel GPUs. Nvidia can certainly work and be stable but has some drawbacks with Wayland from what I remember. (Maybe have been fixed?)

Anticheat is a crap shoot sometimes

Nginx is pretty simple to run as a reverse proxy. Caddy is even easier but not as scalable.

HAProxy looks intimidating at first but it’s pretty easy and very scalable and performant. Wendell from Level1Techs has a nice writeup on their forums

Oh, there’s also Nginx Proxy Manager that is very clean and very easy to work and manage with it’s nice web UI