The question implies that the OP wants to create one giant filesystem with all of their data on it. This has its own issues, especially if it is in /home. For one, as someone else pointed out, it’s fairly difficult to run your system without /home mounted, and that makes it difficult to resize. Sure, you can set up an admin account with it’s home in the /root filesystem and then log into that - but that seems to be a lot of work in itself.

If it was me, I’d set up mount points for file systems that make sense. Maybe /data/Photos, or /data/Music, or data/AppData, or whatever. As much as possible, I’d just point whatever software I was using to those new directories to find the data. If that isn’t feasible, for whatever reason, then a symbolic link from /home/Photos to /data/Photos will work seamlessly in most cases.

As far as I’m concerned, after administering enterprise systems using Unix going as far back as the early 90’s, symbolic links are a key tool in managing disk space that you shouldn’t just dismiss because it’s “an unnecessary layer of complexity”. Having smaller, purpose designed, file systems allows you to manage them better. Sticking everything into /home is probably not the right answer for anyone.

Resizing partitons is often not necessary. Use a symbolic link to relocate a subdirectory to another file system. For 99% of use cases this is indistinguishable from expanding the partition.

I guess they figure that Linux users already know what they are doing when it comes to security.

That’s a little confused. From what I remember, it’s the server that matters, not the domain when being blocked. If you self-host this is a problem, but not if you use your own domain on a commercial service.

The “MX records and such” are all a function of domain management. You’ll have to do this whether or not you self-host.

I never expected to see a compiler in this list, at least not in 2023.

Back in 1988 I realized how rubbish Microsoft was when I discovered Borland’s Turbo Pascal and Turbo C compilers. I’d previously used the MS compilers and they were multipass, multi-minutes to finish a compile. The Borland ones were single pass and FAST.

Back then, compile times could be huge, and everyone was publishing benchmarks on compiled program performance, which mattered on the hardware of the day. I never even think about that stuff these days.