For what it’s worth, I actually had a lot easier time with NVIDIA graphics on Ubuntu and Fedora than Mint. And Kubuntu with the Plasma desktop was the easiest to get my partner converted from Windows without much tweaking.
You could try the booting the live CD and see if you’re able to get the graphics working more easily. And I’ve never seen that second issue on either Ubuntu or Fedora, so not sure what’s up there.
I’m not too happy with the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu right now, but it typically has the most documentation for when issues come up and has a very healthy development cycle, so I still recommend it to most people as a starting place. To me, Mint has always been a little too opinionated and catering to the less technical and thus harder to tweak. Ubuntu kind of does it in a way that makes it easier to override the default easy-mode kind of stuff. Just a general observation from decades of Linux use, and may or may not be as true for the current versions.
I use Fedora with Plasma desktop on my other desktop/laptop devices because I prefer RHEL to Debian based stuff, probably just got used to it using CentOS and now Rocky for all my servers over the years.
Yeah, the system was on a single server at first and eventually expanded to either a docker swarm or Kubernetes cluster. So the single server acts as both a docker host and an NFS server.
I’ve had this happen multiple times, so I use this pattern by default. Mostly these are volumes with just config files and other small stuff that it’s OK if it’s duplicated in the docker cache. If it is something like large image caches or videos or other volumes that I know will end up very large then I probably would have started with storage off the server in the beginning. It saves a significant amount of time to not have to reconfigure everything as it expands if I just have a template that I use from the start.