I would recommend Debian for Raspberry Pi.
I run a bunch of services off mine and it’s been rock solid, and I assume I get upstream security fixes quicker than I would if I were using one of the Debian derivatives.
Primarily cross platform websites and applications.
A great open source .NET project is Jellyfin.
Also, a fun fact is StackOverflow uses .NET :)
After having worked with python and JavaScript quite a bit, I enjoyed diving into the C#/.NET ecosystem.
If your goal is to make a career out of programming I would look at what languages are in demand in your region.
+1 for GNU Stow
I keep my dot files in git repo and have different branches for different machines/environments.
It works well, while not being over complicated.
@graham
@programming.dev