I’ve been using Linux for a couple decades now – I use Windows at work and came to like bing desktop; it’s unexpectedly nice.

There’s always Ctrl+R

It could be a music server with mpd – then you could configure it to stream over http to other devices. Or you could configure it as a client for a music server you keep somewhere else.

Just ext4 on my Linux things; I got scared away from btrfs because of some file loss horror stories

Nice. Take that, adware installers! Web exploits and phishing are still (minor) risks though, since they’re mostly platform agnostic.

nomachine works well in my experience; it’s pretty straightforward to set up. And it offers nice performance. It’s free (as in beer), but it is proprietary software – they make their $$ selling enterprise features on their website.