As others have said, Nextcloud for files/calendar and Tailscale for VPN is your answer.

Nextcloud can be installed in several ways, one of which is Docker Compose. Docker Compose is flexible but requires learning a bit, although you can use it for most self-hosted software.

I agree with this, the issue may be the packages installed rather than the distro. For a more reliable experience, I like to:

• Use Flatpak instead of the AUR where possible
• Use built-in filesystems and avoid DKMS