Yep, this is how I do it on my NAS, which is some RockPro64 board attached to WD Red spin drives. I have music, movies, game saves, documents, pics, etc. that equal around 1.5TB and I don’t seem to get excess scanning when “watch files” is turned on.
If you’re willing to forgo the GUI installer requirement, take a look at Void Linux. Pretty slim base installation, very stable and conservative package updates for a rolling release. Excelllent package manager. Downside might be smaller package selection than Debian or Arch.
Yep, been using it as my daily driver for a few years now, aside from trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for a few months. I’ve settled on running it with sway as my wm for the time being. I’ve generally been pretty happy with it. I like the package manager and the relative simplicity of the system, which requires a bit more work to set up but seems easier to understand/fix when something goes wrong (usually user error in my experience, lol.) The developers also proved that they could learn from their mistakes with a minimum of drama after the whole kerfluffle with the original creator. Most packages that I need that aren’t in the repo can be had with flatpak. Overall, a relatively pleasant Linux distro experience.
Edit: Forgot to mention, in my experience an actually stable AND rolling release distribution!
Btw, here is a small void linux community for lemmy. It doesn’t appear to be very active, but hopefully that will change with time.
Are you using Steam Input Settings to map those dpad buttons? If so, try setting that back to default, then use AntiMicroX to map keyboard input to your dpad instead.