Most of my hardware I picked up at the local school board surplus. Also don’t ever throw anything out. Old desktops or laptops, you can put Linux on anything. Eventually I bought a 2 bay NAS on sale. Started with surplus server spinning rust drives, then upgraded to shuckable WD drives on a Black Friday. It takes a while but eventually your network becomes a server farm. Patience is the best way to build it. Other resources are office surplus on eBay too. Have fun, try different distros. Check out different flavors of Ubuntu, Mint, Debian and even Nix. everything you do is building your skills. Do you know a neighbor getting rid of an old Mac? Try it all out!

Have you tried getting just one link to work? Troubleshooting is best when you start with a small problem and work up to more complexity. Narrow down what the issue is. You dumped a ton of data and text in your post. I don’t have a page of bookmarks in my dashboard. I tried a link at one point and never got it to work. I assumed at the time it had to do with http vs https but just decided I don’t need that link in my HA dashboard. Good luck to you.