Wilmo

I feel like what Vanilla OS does is interesting. But with something more stable and mature like Silverblue + Toolbx or Distrobox you’d be able to achieve the same thing.

Just make sure your Pixel 8 is unlocked. The rest is very simple.

If you’re going to self host I would personally recommend Immich though. I think Ente is great if you do want a cloud provider and no overhead.

When I became a professional developer, I felt the friction of windows and package management. I knew of Linux desktop, and had used Ubuntu briefly in around 2008 or 09, and then at the time in 2021 I made the switch to Fedora for ease of dev. And never looked back.