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Hint. The secure erase commands are challenging. First you have to hot attach the drive. If you boot with drive connected it will be locked usually plus there is usually a timeout where it locks too. Then you have to use the correct security commands to unlock the drive for erase to work.
You might want to use dd to just copy zeros to fill the drive at the device level. Takes time but will delete the data.
Another option is to hardware erase. I think hdparm can do that but it is a bit tricky.
Another method is to use blkdiscard if it is say an SSD or another drive with that sort of funtionality.
Just make sure your referencing the correct block device with any of these methods as they are pretty destructive operations.
Edit: With dd it might be good enough just to erase the leading and trailing 1MiB of the drive. The partition and backup partition info is usually there.
Edit: Drives can also have drive firmware level locking and passwords. I think hdparm can play with those too.
Keep in mind face unlock on most devices is really not very secure. Apple is maybe the only one that comes close.
Actually I like Cinnamom the best. For VMs without video accelertion, XFCE. For media center and my laptop I stayed with Ubuntu/Gnome.
Work flow. Any desktop will do, that is more about Apps. For me Firefox, LibreOffice esp Calc, Python, Bash, Thunderbird, ssh, Zim, Geany are what I use most.
Connect the AP to a Gigabit ethernet port. No way that should be limited to 100MBit.
My point is use ethernet not a WiFi connection. Also use an AP with a Gigabit port.
Regrading AP. Why can’t you just use the wifi functionlity and let your server do the rest? APs are really just glorified WiFi cards with a bridge.
I would not want to expose my home server to the internet. VMs have been breached, network stacks too, and any exposed services. I would dump the windows stuff, if nothing else it is not future proof. Consider an AP. Backup consider a hot mount sata enclosure. One can then do swapable high speed backups. I would want off line and off site backups. One issue with rsync is it may not store all file attributes. Just be aware and it may not keep historical snapshots. Some of this depends on how it is configured. Also rsync may not be that secure though it can be too depending how configured.
Edit: Cool concept though. Thanks for sharing.
Edit: Might want to consider some level of volume shadowing or Raid on your server and NAS. Maybe some snapshotting.
Edit: Future proof, have enough memory, cores, and storage.
You can just buy a system with Linux preinstalled. My laptop is from System76. I usually build desktops/towers from scratch but they sell those too.
Installing apps has always been easier on Linux then on Windows as Linux has had large free app stores back 30 years. The question is more are the apps you want in the app store. If not things get harder. I like Debian based distros like Ubuntu or Linux Mint as they have large app stores.
You might want to look at distrowatch.com. Mint is currently at the top.