It’s certainly doable and something like that was my setup for a few years. There isn’t much in the way of distros or software packages that provide such a ‘personal multiseat’ configuration out of the box.

I’d suggest starting with anything graphically intensive running on bare metal and setting up a VM with virt-manager / Virtualbox / etc. for the NAS part. Get a couple of disks specifically to pass through to the NAS VM, forward its ports to LAN, and connect to them on the host as you would any other machine. For a desk further away, you may be able to get away with a KVM extender, but I can’t say I’ve any experience with them.

If you try to virtualize everything like I did, there’s a couple of hurdles:

• Much time and manual configuration in the command line is needed
• Atrocious graphical and input latency on remote connections
• Very high RAM usage
• Input glitches and general slowness on the VM with GPU passthrough, remained unresolved despite scouring tutorials from people who somehow managed to get buttery-smooth gaming in a VM
• Lots of bandwidth used while updating all of the VMs. Probably optimizable, but not out of the box.

Go for AMD if you can, but NVIDIA hasn’t given me much trouble either. Make sure to install the driver from your distro’s repo, not NVIDIA’s website. IMO, this is less of an issue if you decide to pass through the GPU to a VM since any NVIDIA driver shenanigans will be contained to the VM.

Debian stable:

• Works on all of my devices, none of which are newer than 2019
• Compatibility with all of the software that I use day to day
• I like my system set up in a very particular way and the stability makes upkeep simple
• I was a holdout on older Windows versions before I moved to Linux, so getting new features at all is already exciting

In an academic setting, LibreOffice is a good substitute if:

• Documents will not be passed back and forth between LibreOffice and MS Office for collaboration
• Teachers accept assignments in PDF format

I got away with using LibreOffice in university since:

• Opening and reading files prepared in MS Office almost always works
• Every formatting option I had used in MS Office was also present in LibreOffice
• Professors accepted work I prepared in LibreOffice and exported as PDF to guarantee that my formatting stays intact
• Students and professors almost always used Google Docs for collaborative work

From experience, a moderately-formatted document with images will survive about 3 round trips between MS Office and LibreOffice before something breaks (things on the page get completely rearranged or get stuck and can’t be moved or deleted).

And despite having used LibreOffice for several years now, I still feel like I’m having a stroke when I see the default interface. For sanity, either set the user interface (under View menu) to tabbed or sidebar, or customize the toolbar to match that of Google Docs.

I didn’t

It’s also likely that the mSATA slot is bottlenecked since it runs at SATA II speeds while the 2.5 bay runs at SATA III speeds. This becomes noticeable with heavy swapping or flatpak updates. I found this out the hard way because I want my boot drive on my 256 GB mSATA instead of the 2 TB SSD that I use for media and backups.

I’m also considering this when it comes time for me to update. I would:

• Throw a spare SSD or equal or greater size into a USB enclosure
• Clone my boot drive to it using Clonezilla
• Remove the original boot drive to avoid UUID collisions
• Boot off the spare SSD and perform the update

When maximizing uptime, Debian is the no-fuss way to go.

Possibly overestimating the value of the data entrusted to me, but whenever I see that xkcd, I like to think that I at least have the option to remain silent and die with dignity if I really don’t want the contents of my disk out there.