Linux

I think I'd recommend having at least 2 PCs. Your gaming PC is going to be terribly inefficient and draw 10x as much power at idle as a server with a mobile processor. Leaving it running 24/7 will get expensive to the extent that buying a dedicated server makes more sense. Plus if your gaming/work PC ever crashes while you're working, your server will crash as well.

Also if you ever work outside the home you probably want to have something that doesn't require a network connection.

You can get Yunohost set up with a single command.

It's certainly doable and something like that was my setup for a few years. There isn't much in the way of distros or software packages that provide such a 'personal multiseat' configuration out of the box.

I'd suggest starting with anything graphically intensive running on bare metal and setting up a VM with virt-manager / Virtualbox / etc. for the NAS part. Get a couple of disks specifically to pass through to the NAS VM, forward its ports to LAN, and connect to them on the host as you would any other machine. For a desk further away, you may be able to get away with a KVM extender, but I can't say I've any experience with them.

If you try to virtualize everything like I did, there's a couple of hurdles:

• Much time and manual configuration in the command line is needed
• Atrocious graphical and input latency on remote connections
• Very high RAM usage
• Input glitches and general slowness on the VM with GPU passthrough, remained unresolved despite scouring tutorials from people who somehow managed to get buttery-smooth gaming in a VM
• Lots of bandwidth used while updating all of the VMs. Probably optimizable, but not out of the box.

Go for AMD if you can, but NVIDIA hasn't given me much trouble either. Make sure to install the driver from your distro's repo, not NVIDIA's website. IMO, this is less of an issue if you decide to pass through the GPU to a VM since any NVIDIA driver shenanigans will be contained to the VM.

my knowledge of technical stuff is bretty basic so please be patient with me.

First of all, just from the fact that you're posting here and asking that kind of question, your knowledge of technical stuff is at least a little bit beyond "pretty basic."

Second, I get the impression that confusion over exactly what you're asking for is maybe more due to English not being your first language...? (No judgement if that's the case; your English is certainly way better than I could do in a second language.)

Anyway, on to actually giving my answer to your question:

• Trying to set up a multiseat system can be tricky in general. If I recall, Other Linus (the one from Linus Tech Tips) has released several videos about that sort of thing over the years, but I don't think any of the tries were successful enough for him to daily-drive long-term. I know LTT is controversial, but it might be worth taking a look at his experience.

• Trying to do it with GPU passthrough for gaming and 3D modeling adds an additional layer of complexity. I'm a software engineer and have been using Linux exclusively at home for almost a decade (and off and on for many years before that), and even I don't have GPU passthrough working on my home server. That's not necessarily to say that it's super difficult -- I haven't tried very hard to figure it out -- just that it isn't trivial even for somebody with experience.

• If the above has scared you off from the whole "multiseat home server" thing but you still want a home Linux PC for gaming, my distro recommendation would be either bazzite, which I haven't used, but have heard good things about its appropriateness for that use-case, or boring ol' Ubuntu (or variant like Kubuntu, depending on your UI preference), which is popular enough to have official support from corporations like Valve and AMD and thus is most likely to "just work."

• If the above didn't scare you off from building a home server, I recommend running Proxmox on it.

• As for Nvidia, I fucking hate Nvidia for its CUDA monopoly and would never recommend it out of principle, but I have to grudgingly admit that some stuff just flat-out won't run on AMD or Intel GPUs. I believe proprietary "niche 3D software" is one of the most likely things to fall into that category, so you may have literally no choice. Check the system requirements of the particular software you plan to use.

• The other features that you might lose out on by not using Nvidia are raytracing and hardware-accelerated PhysX. The AMD 9070 XT allegedly has decent raytracing, but although I own one I haven't verified that yet because I don't own any raytraced games. I tried the Half-Life 2 RTX demo, but it failed to start at all. As for PhysX, there are two important things to know: first, that should be improving because Nvidia is working on open-sourcing it. Second, for older games using the older PhysX API, the new 50-series Nvidia cards don't support them either. Apparently, if you want a decade+ old game like Mirror's Edge to work properly on your 5090, you've got to also have some cheap older Nvidia card alongside it to offload the PhysX calculations to, LOL.

• Speaking of multiple cards, if you want to build a server that supports multiple GPU-accelerated users at the same time, you might consider getting multiple cheaper GPUs instead of one 5090. Although I believe virtually slicing a single GPU for passthrough access by multiple VMs at once may be possible in theory, the phrase "may be possible in theory" should be setting off alarm bells in your mind that it ain't gonna be easy.

Not sure if I understand you correctly.

Your goal is to have a single (1) computer that replaces all computers you currently have by essentially virtualizing different systems?

I'm setting up something similar using Unraid and VMs. This route would probably be more of a challenge for you technically.. But if you're willing to learn, and pay, Unraid sounds like it would be a good fit for what you're trying to accomplish.

For the multi-seating aspect, I've just set up something similar using something called a KVM Extender (I got this one). I have my PC set up in my office and another seat set up in my bedroom.

The KVM essentially just transports HDMI and USB a long distance through an ethernet cable, so the bedroom monitor just appears as a second monitor. I've set up a keyboard combination to switch between enabled monitors so only one is turned on at once.

Not sure how many seats you could push with this, since you would need a set of KVM extender boxes per seat with its own HDMI/Display and USB ports in the PC. Might be something to look into in case it fits!

3d heavy modeling

Depending on the program of choice to go with AMD over NVIDIA will heavily impact your performance as cuda is better optimized than rocm. For me rocking rtx3060 it was hit or miss. It mostly depends on the distro if they choose to package the NVIDIA drivers out of the box. Some distros value freedom over usability. Right now I am daily driving bazzite and I am happy with it. For drivers its self I didn't notice any major issues.

From your convoluted explanation I assume you have one PC already and you want to upgrade. I would just get a new one for work stuff and old one set up as "light work" as you put it or hook up to the TVs

What exactly are you looking for? "Home Server" and "NAS" are both terms used to describe computers running server software and basically nothing else. Their purpose is to run webservers (the infrastructure behind lemmy.world), game servers (the thing you can connect to in Minecraft, for instance), E-Mail servers (like GMail - not the App on your phone, but what it connects to to get your E-Mails from) and so on. Essentially, they exist just so that other computers can talk to them.

Nearly every server is headless (no mouse and keyboard, no screen). To interface with it, you connect over the internet. You rarely see them run a graphical interface (to save resources) - people use the terminal to administrate them.

Do you want a PC (as in: personal computer) instead? PCs (including laptops and smartphones) run (mostly) graphical applications and end-user applications, such as web browsers, E-Mail clients, office programs, games, etc. In this case, try usual PC hardware. Most will work on Linux (it might be adequate to point out that there are PCs available built specifically to run Linux). General hardware compatibility is pretty good for standard peripherals such as keyboards, mouses, speakers, monitors and cameras (exception for all of them: MacBooks and newer NVIDIA graphics cards). In the Laptop world, many seem to enjoy ThinkPads. Pick a distro (https://distrowiz.pages.dev/, I use Fedora btw), pick a Desktop Environment if you're allowed to choose (technically you can always install another DE, it might just become messy) (the big ones are all great, the Deck's desktop mode uses KDE Plasma) and off you go. Tip: Test your distro in a VM.

As for the Terminal: You won't need it unless you go with Arch. Most of the time. The terminal is just very fast and way more standardized than GUIs. Therefore, Tutorials will use it all of the time. In rare occasions, GUI tools are not available. Good news: Learning the terminal is not as hard as learning to code. Once you feel ready, do try to learn how to use it. It's a good QOL improvement.