I like samba because I can mount it as a folder in the file explorer of my Linux desktop. But Samba is a little slow.

I have a samba fileserver behind wireguard. Would copyparty be an improvement over samba?

I don’t recommend buying a discrete GPU. For home-level hardware iGPU systems like Strix Halo are much better than discrete systems. For example Strix Halo can run models that you need multiple 5090s for.