Had several issues when upgrading to 41, so I only upgraded to 42 a month or two ago in order to give them time to iron out the bugs first…

Still are, but I guess a lot of people don’t know much about them

I’m not up to date on hardware, so I’ll refrain from recommending specific components. I went with AMD Ryzen CPU and Nvidia GPU (using closed source driver) last time I upgraded my PC and it usually works fine, though I know many recommend AMD GPUs nowadays for Linux. If €1000 is your total budget, it might be worth considering a second hand GPU. For example a used RTX 3080 goes for around €300 and they are still quite capable, though someone else will have to say if that’s enough for the flight sims.

One thing you might want to look up is if the game uses hardware raytracing, and if that works on Linux. Out of the games I play, World of Warships looks worse for me than what I see on youtube, despite that I have set all graphics settings to max. Maybe it’s possible to fix by configuring Wine/Proton/DXVK etc. I haven’t really looked into it, but just so you’re aware of potential issues.

I used this list for help when choosing a power supply, but I think that becomes more important if you buy a high end GPU.

I use Steam for almost all my gaming, and it makes running (most) Windows games a breeze.

So far that has never happened because I’m not using that much storage :) But I shut it down when I need to turn off the mains electricity, and for powering it on afterwards the fake wall can be lifted off. It’s just the area underneath the desk so the panel might be smaller than it sounds like, and it hangs on some hooks so it’s fairly easy to remove if you know what you’re doing. Painted in the same colour as the wall, and with some some random junk on the floor in front, it blends in quite well though. I think the risk of burglary is fairly low, so it’s primarily to soothe my own paranoia.

I mounted mine on the wall under a desk in a room with no other electronics, and then put up a fake wall in front of the server. It can draw in air from the sides, and exhaust upwards behind the desk. But the only real solution is offsite backup, which will also protect against fire and other disasters.

If you specify a budget then people might be able to give some recommendations, if you like.

As for aesthetics, Fractal Design offer a few cases which look really nice, if you like the Scandinavian design style. The overview shows all cases with glass or mesh sides, but there’s usually an option to get an opaque door if you don’t want LEDs from the electronics shining through

Paper GTK theme is a little bit similar, though with more vibrant colours ofc.