On the fly atomic updates (the recommended update path for DNF installed apps requires a system reboot.) Though you can do it live, doing offline upgrades is safer so you don't replace some runtime something is using midflight.
Also, flatpaks have some system isolation and have to use flatpak portals and explicit permissions/mounts giving them less ability to negatively affect my system.
Also, Flathub just has everything that I need to run anyway, at least for GUI apps.
Fedora Workstation is what I use for my desktop. If I were to have to reinstall now I'd do Silverblue.
For my home lab I do Proxmox with a couple of VM's for Ubuntu server for pihole DNS servers and an OpenMediaVault VM for my docker workloads. I'd probably do CoreOS or IoT if I was starting over there though.
Every graphical app I have installed that isn't a basic system application included with the distro install is either in a podman container or flatpak.
You can try Organic Maps if you have a pressing need for privacy in your maps app.
It seems... okay... when I used it. No support for android or apple auto integration though.
Matrix is the usual suggestion. I've never used voice chat on it or the clients for it like Element though so I can't speak to how well it works if you need that function in Discord.
If the Fedora group starts doing dumb stuff I'll consider switching. But so far they've been rock solid. While Red Hat is certainly a major contributor to Fedora (the biggest easily) they don't control it per-say.
Twitter isn't their customer friends.
I'm generally pretty happy with it, though I'd have used podman rather than docker if I were starting now.
Check out Podlet to convert your existing docker run commands or docker-compose.yaml files to quadlet files https://github.com/k9withabone/podlet
What I did is install proxmox on the bare metal, setup a vm in which I put the containers.
Proxmox itself stays (almost) completely stock. The only changes I've made to it were to add the NUT client package so it could gracefully shut down if my NUT server indicates that the UPS is running out of power during an outage.
In your VMs you can do whatever. Setup OMV, or a stock Ubuntu or Debian vm and install your services on the VM or use Docker/Podman. Setup Fedora CoreOS or IoT vms and host all your services in Podman containers.
The great thing about Proxmox is you can do snapshot backups which take mere moments to complete. Then pass those off to a NAS where they can survive a irreparable loss of your Proxmox server.
You can also spin up new vms as needed to just try to fuck around with new techs or just a new way of setting up your home lab. It gives you a ton of flexibility and makes backing stuff up way easier.
Another great thing you can do is if 3 years down the line you are looking to replace your server hardware with some newer or more powerful stuff you can just add the new device as a node to the cluster. Then you can migrate all your existing VMs over to your new hardware and decommission your old one with very little to no downtime on anything.
Nice, people will absolutely try to steal it if you don't properly lock it up. Make sure you get a good U lock and take the battery with you if it's not lockable (and take it with you even if it is if you'll be gone for a while)