Read (only) access should be fine. What makes it complicated is if there can be writes from multiple locations. Basically, the simple version would be to just periodically copy the data from the primary to all secondary locations.
If the data only needs to be read & written from a single server (and the others are just backups), you can also use simpler replication instead of synchthing. E.g. syncoid or TrueNAS replication. It sounds like you should be able to do that with separate datasets per household in your usecase.
I would probably go with a simple approach like this:
ZFS: Each house gets a "NAS" that provides a ZFS filesystem to store the data. This gives you the ability to share the drives across your use cases (you, rest of the family), snapshots, RAIDZ support, and usage quotas. For the OS, you could use what you prefer (TrueNAS, Debian, Ubuntu, ...).
Syncthing to synchronize the files across the servers/houses. This allows you to read and write data from anywhere and syncthing will mirror the writes to the other places. I use it to synchronize data across 5 devices and it works quite well.
There are probably more advanced (enterprise?) ways to handle the file synchronization. But, I think this hould be good enough for normal, personal use. The main disadvantage is that you're only synchronizing the current data (excluding the ZFS snapshots). On the other hand, this also allows you to mix file systems if necessary.
If you have an AMD GPU (except for the very latest GPUs), you should be good out of the box. The AMD driver comes pre-installed with mesa.
Other than that... don't use NTFS to store your games.
Edit: Maybe I misunderstood your question. I understood it as: What are some recommended changes to do after installing a Linux distro. Did you meant to ask about differences between distros?
Probably trying to share a Stream drive between Linux and Windows. Trying to run games from NTFS just didn't work and resulted in all kinds of weird issues. I was close to giving up on Linux but after I switched to an ext3 partition things just started working :|
In Fedora, Discover shows this in the top right corner. It also shows the available package sources under Settings. Perhaps this is not yet available in the older Debian version of Discover. You could also just look at the version of certain software. E.g., if GIMP is version 3.x it's a flatpak (or snap), otherwise it's a Debian package.
The Linux Experiment recently looked into touchscreen support of different desktop enviromenents. His findings mostly align with your comment. However, this seems to be one of the rare cases where the distro matters for Gnome. Upstream Gnome (e.g., as shipped by Fedora) works fine with touch screens, but support on Ubuntu Gnome appears to be quite broken.
Yeah, the "Nvidia (GTX 9xx-10xx Series)" should be the correct driver for your GPU. It seems that both desktop and notebook GPUs used the same architecture in this case.
I think the difference is that Bazzite chooses the open source Nvidia kernel driver for the newer GPUs. That one doesn't support the GTX 900 series, so you'll get the older proprietary kernel driver.
Many things are very similar on Linux compared to Windows (e.g. Browsing, Steam). One big difference is that people prefer using package managers to install software (instead of downloading and installing it manually).
I’m considering Pop!_OS seeing as its praised for its compatibility and easy switching.
Pop!_OS is a nice distro and it should work well for you if you like the UI. There also many other good distros if you want to play around a bit. You can easily test them using a Live ISO.
What’s the situation with gaming look like? I know gaming on Linux has been a HIGHLY discussed topic for a while, is it easy to play any (non triple-A) steam game? I’m nowhere near involved in computer science, I’d just consider myself more stubborn than most end-users so I can persevere through some basic problems.
I'd say that you can expect almost all games to work. The main exception are games with anti-cheat that decide not to support Linux. In my case, there has only been one game in the last two years that didn't work (War Thunder crashes a lot more than on Windows). Playing AAA games is generally not an issue. You can check https://www.protondb.com/ for specific games.
True, Linux applications (e.g. apt, dnf, pip, but also rm, sudo, and many more) would be more precise.
For Arch, it's probably not so easy to define "essential" packages, as it, for example, supports many different bootloaders. It is of course also a question of distro philosophy and target audience. Personally, I've noticed that "rm -r" as root prompts for every file on RHEL but does not on Arch...
I'd say Mint is fine for gaming, as long as your hardware is supported. I'm using it with an Nvidia GPU on X11 and I can play all the games I want to play (Steam is Steam after all). My main gripe is that multi-monitor VRR doesn't work on X11, but it hasn't pushed me to another distro just yet...
For people/beginners that mostly want to game on a computer, I'd say that actually something "immutable" like Bazzite might be one of the best options.
Makes sense. But for an Arc B580 you'd probably want 6.12 or newer (according to https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-gpu-compute). Unfortunately Linux Mint is not that great for running the very latest hardware (and especially GPUs).
Read (only) access should be fine. What makes it complicated is if there can be writes from multiple locations. Basically, the simple version would be to just periodically copy the data from the primary to all secondary locations.