Agreed, but use sway instead of i3 for Wayland support.

Pretty sure codeberg.org uses forgejo under the hood.

Another very solid option for self hosting is just adding a git user to a server with git installed, initiate bare repositories there, then talk to them with git@example.com:repo-name

Fair, whatever works for you!

Although from experience, most long-time Linux users have “started over” in different distros a couple of times. It’s not as daunting as one might think, and it’s also a decent learning experience to really understand how distros differ and (maybe more importantly), how they don’t

Yes, specificially hardware missing the prerequisites for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 iirc.

I think stability and a clean architecture are underrated qualities for “noob friendly” distros, while badly emulating windows is overrated. I also think you should give Fedora (plus rpm-fusion for non-free drivers and codecs) a try, it’s worth it!