How’s the performance for media on that thing? I was eying up the surface go line to replace an android tablet that I mostly use for playing movies and TV shows I’ve downloaded. Think it would do okay playing back 1080p and higher content?

Sorry, still not understanding your position, can you explain a bit more?

Explain more, I don’t understand.

They have a Linux GUI, though admittedly I’ve never used it.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_linux_gui.html

Rufus, the bootable usb creator?

You should be able to natively do what Rufus does in Linux, if you have a disk imaging software installed. I think Ubuntu comes with gnome-disks, you right click an ISO file, click open with, select disk image writer, and select the destination device (your USB drive) and it writes the ISO file to the USB device. You should double check it actually makes it bootable, but I think it does.

You can also use Ventoy to do what you want. You install it to the USB drive and then just drop the ISO files into a folder that you want to boot from, and it creates a menu for you to choose which ISO file to choose at boot time.

Alpine is an interesting choice for hosting, really curious what situation you’re hosting in that would require that level or lightness for a distro?

My favorite story about best buy is in the early 2000’s, a family member gifted me a $20 gift card to best buy, which unbeknownst to them, I had stopped shopping at because it got too expensive and I started buying from newegg instead. Anyway, I walk in and am thinking 'well I don’t really need anything big right now, like a full PC, laptop, etc. Maybe I’ll just get a DVD or something."

Even with a $20 gift card, Best buy prices were so marked up, they were either still more expensive, or the same price as other stores. I think other stores were selling DVD’s at like $15 (not new-releases) and best buy was $35. I walked out and never ended up buying anything. I’m shocked they’re still around to be honest.

Mixed with syncthing to sync your database file across your devices and its chef’s kiss

I’m not sure I would agree for arch if the OP wants low maintenance. I’ve never run it myself, but the way I’ve heard arch described is the further you go without regular updates the more likely you are to have a problem when you do update.