Do you really want to run this yourself? If the data is that important to you, I’d probably rather invest in something like a Synology NAS. They make sure that updates won’t kill your data, everything stays secure and you don’t have to mess with mdadm or LVM yourself.

Under the hood, Synology’s SHR also uses bog-standard MD and LVM. So even if the NAS dies, you can still read your data on any Linux machine. But you won’t have to think about updates potentially breaking anything and it has a plethora of features around storage management that you can configure with a few clicks instead of messing around with system packages, config files and systemd.

Yeah, but if your dream second hand laptop has everything but USB-C charging, you can easily get such adapter and basically make it USB-C charging capable. 😉

About the last bit: There are these now. Available for all usual laptop plugs and voltages. Much easier to carry with you than a separate AC brick.

I’m using fish and the default is enough for anybody. 😁