I think I'm happy with the progress... installed minimal Ubuntu on Thursday, worked on it for way too many hours via SSH after manually configuring the NIC that wasn't detected during install, stayed mostly off screens on Friday, put in a couple hours chasing a connection issue that ended up being a Firefox on both a MacBook AND an Ubuntu Laptop. Did a couple tear it down and relaunch it agains to make sure it was right from the start... Now in the hours taking Saturday into Sunday, I'm on my MacBook listening to my music library from my fully automated Kubernetes lab.
My experiences have been AWS, ECS, Cloudformation, CodeDeploy (I did use GitHub Actions a couple times previously), so there was a bit of a learning curve. What I've done is put together an old tower (8 year old workstation that half of the gear was originally built 12 years back) as a Kubernetes lab, used Terraform and GitHub actions to provision and deploy it this weekend. All the automation scripting was written in YAML which is used within a lot of other languages, so good to check out.
what is in the screenshot, 2 terminal windows, top one an SSH session into the Lab running the 'top' command to watch resources and the bottom is on the Mac running k9s viewing live Kubernetes logs from the music Navidrome pod... then the feishin media player playing from my 800GB audio library (been ripping CDs and Cassettes to MP3 since 2001 then 15 years or so everything is FLAC files... it took nearly 5 hours to transfer over to the server drive).