Good move. I have my home network and its home lab the same way I run my work networks and server clusters:

1. Management network over regular copper ethernet. This is what’s routed over VPN for remote access. IPMI also connects here for when something really stupid happens.
2. High speed fiber connecting all the servers. Not routed out - it’s only used for comms between the servers. This serves as a backup in case the management port dies. It has saved me a couple of times: shell in to one of the others the normal way, the from there I can jump into any other server via the fiber connection.

I’m just gonna leave this here: https://youtu.be/js9yUz_3MHg

I have a pelicase of 40 4TB SAS drives sitting in my basement. It might be worth a fortune one day.

Yes. Newest version of mint uses pipewire as audio engine, and if you combine that with the good old pulsaudio controller (which works with pipewire via a plugin), you can micro which app input/output goes to which device.

This works more or less out of the box. I think I remember needing to install pulseaudio-pipe or something similarly named, or it might be included by default.

Source: When working with audio I have multiple audio hardware running at once, each with different behavior and associated software.