Australia can be expensive as an overseas student as government subsidies local students. I believe if you look at places like Adelaide or Perth it’s easier to get permanent residency, especially if you’re happy to be in a regional area

I feel lucky that I played fable games as a kid and never heard of this dude so I just saw the games for what they were, no inkling of any broken promises to taint what were actually good games

If you do end up going down the Linux route have a look at cockpit, it’s a Web ui that you can use to manage your file sharing and storage etc with plugins, it will get you similar functionality to using truenas scale but with the added benefit of being to use the machine as a normal computer if you want

Plus no volume control so you often get instantly ear blasted