I’d recommend Ceph (in the form of Rook ) if you’re willing to put in the time to learn it. For a simpler solution, check out Longhorn. Ceph is more mature, and Rook is just a solution that almost fully automates its deployment on kubernetes, while Longhorn is built from scratch as a kubernetes native storage solution. The people who built Longhorn (Rancher Labs) also make a FOSS kubernetes management service called Rancher, so if you prefer a more intuitive web UI for K8s, be sure to check that out too

Rook is the 2nd most used container storage solution I’ve encountered or set up at my job, with legacy storage appliances like IBM FlashSystem and NetApp being the first

Element is a messenger and will never have the UX of Discord. There is Revolt, which is actually similar to discord but self-hostable

To be fair, Fedora switching to something as default isn’t a good sign that you should start using it. I do agree, though, btrfs has come far enough to be a default choice for most people.