My cat lacks the scruff response. Probably why we found him alone without his mother and litter. Anyway, he's an asshole who cannot be restrained by scruffing, and somehow we love him anyway.
Right, so it does basically the same thing mine does, and I don't need an external DAS, and I can upgrade hardware, and it cost me a fraction of yours. I don't know how much power mine uses because it's a non-issue. My bill is the exact same as before I deployed it.
I wouldn't have even thought to purchase a new Mac anything as a server. That is definitely not their target use case.
What are you running at home that requires "insane power?" I'm running a servarr stack on an old Xeon that cost a fraction of a Mac mini and it works just fine. And I have room in the case for full size HDDs.
I've heard of people using old Mac mini as servers, and I guess whatever makes you happy. I definitely don't see how they're the ultimate home server.
Why not use the NAS as a NAS and pick up a cheap SFF or mini workstation for the compute tasks? Only reason I would ever consider running your endpoint as a server 24/7 is cost/availability of just adding a dedicated box.
Ubuntu's not "cool." Personally I don't care for GNOME or the theming in general. Also snaps are not popular. I do like the Debian base though, so I just use Debian KDE.
Being a scientist could have been so fun and satisfying