Another option to consider is IncusOS, which reached stable a week ago. I have nothing but good things to say about it based on experimentation on similar hardware to you since then.
If you have a TPM and want to go all in on Incus, I’d recommend at least giving it a look.
If you do, setup wise I would recommend:
- Use the 256GB as your boot drive. The installer will set it up with a partitions needed for the base OS and secure boot.
- Provision the 4 TB NVMe as a seperate ZFS pool and use for any container/vm storage.
- Setup the 4 TB HDD as third pool for anything non-latency sensitive (custom volumes with media, backups etc). If when you have the interest / need (or lets be honest here, it’s a homelab so more likely want) you could also expand that out with a mirror HDD and potentially a SSD (preferably mirror) special vdev depending on what your workloads look like.
All of this can be done through the Incus CLI.
Network wise there’s some good pointers in this thread too about recommended ways to bridge to external networks.