Well for one its not as automatic as it sounds. Basic protections will get you far. I have a minecraft server exposed but it only accepts connections from 3 specific places. Remember its the same as ever other real life deterrant, make yourself less of a target than the next guy. It also really helps not having juicy company data on your network. Home networks are way less of a target because you dont have any fine booty to loot.
Whats your use case for the NAS? Mine is a media library and anything over USB would really suck. But I have a oldish TerraStation running a modified version of debian for my NAS. It’d probably be easiest using an old desktop and just throwing whatever debian stable is on it.
Yeah I dont even use it. I open a terminal at my destination and do it through the cli. Though admittedly I don’t have any real use cases for dragging and dropping that can’t be worked around “easily”.
My pi 1b handles the internal DNS for my game servers, which at this point is actually just minecraft because PSO:BB was way harder to setup than I thought. It works and it is extremely easy and it still holes all the tracking stuff too.
It shouldnt be any different than doing it on Debian tbh. Mine is a Buffalo Terrastation running Debian. I use mergerFS and I think I SMB? I actually havent messed with it in so long I barely remember cause it never has issues.
Run some jellyfin on it just for your house
It just widens your attack surface for the ghost army of bots that roam the net knocking on ports, you don’t want to be someone else’s sap. I would imagine most home attacks fall into three categories: script kiddies just war driving, targeted attacks on someone specific, or just plain ol’ looking for sensitive docs for identity theft or something. Its still the net, man. If you leave your ass hanging out someone’s gonna bite it in a new way every time.
If you can search the internet good and can read the arch wiki you’ll be fine. If you’ve been playing on computers and maybe modding some games you’ll also be fine. The command line is only scary cause we are used to visuals.