What is your swappiness? If you have all that ram you should not be swapping. You are probably still at a swappiness for an average system, 60. Try 10. sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

They are all pretty good. I usually go with Ubuntu server + Docker Compose and turn on live kernel patches. If it’s not getting exposed to the internet, you probably don’t care about live kernel patching. What ever server distro you choose, Docker Compose makes it all easy. If you are used to Red Hat, I think RHEL has a few solid derivatives that you’ll be easily familiar with.

You can make a live thumb drive that will walk you through. The installers for server look the same as they did 20+ years ago.

I used the Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 for 7 or 8 years as my main computer. I used Ubuntu on it the whole time so it always felt fast and new. The only reason I had to upgrade, I started running more and more docker containers for the project I was doing and the Yoga Pro 2 just didn’t have the cores and ram. I gave it to my cousin. I switched to a mini-pc (lots of ram and lots of cores) and bought a portable 4k monitor. It’s lame that the whole Yoga Pro 2 had to be replaced, when all I needed was more cores and more ram. Now I just buy a new mini-pc when I need. Or just a new monitor when I need, etc. A laptop would have a battery, but I don’t need that; just the portability. But hands down would have just upgraded my Yoga Pro 2 if I could have.

I’m not a Fedora user, but seems like a middle ground between Bazzite and Fedora for your desktop, could be to use distrobox to have the mutable part. I don’t know exactly how much configuration fedora needs, maybe none. Anyways, distrobox is a good tool to have no matter what distro or type.