Showing interest in tech or programming was always the number one hiring criteria for me.
IT is so a fast changing job that you want to keep up just with your job alone, so if your company wants innovation they need people that do stuff like this in their free time.
This doubly applies for people fresh out of school, cause honestly you don't learn nearly enough to do the job there. So every little extra gives you a lead against your concurrence.
My script looks like this: https://gist.github.com/dgalli1/010fb978bae509dda43a1f31145a530f
And is ment to update docker-compose.yml files.
Your DE won't use that much cpu no matter which you use.
As long as you want to run out of ram you should be fine.
But imo it's a bad idea to mix a server os with a normal desktop use.
How about using proxmox and having a vm just for desktop use, like this you could also just pause all the resources easily when you're not using your desktop computer. Personally i would have a debian stable and a proxomx vm and just enable the proxmox vm whenever I need it.
If your not scared of scripting you could also unsuspend the vm via a keyboard listener. (for example trigger unsuspend when key f3 is pressed. This would be doable with evtest and qm resume )
Or if you don't want to use a vm you could also disable the autostart of the DE and start it via shell when you really need it.
People are overcomplicating stuff because they fear for security.
Move fast and break stuff, and just start somewhere.
You will not die if you run your setup without reverse proxy for a week.
Just go step for step till everything is nice and secure.
Also the thing about understanding everything is a habit that you get in school. But in bigger software projects it's not feasible at least in my experience.
I'm currently using CasaOS but I keep hearing bad things about it such as very poor security.
Never heard that before, if that is your reason i would just continue using it.
If you want to save on resources you should use containers instead of vm's.