I personally do a ton of game streaming to my Steam Deck which is my main driver for using Windows as it works better with NVIDIA Shield + Moonlight, but I highly recommend you give Pop!OS a try. I’m very pro-linux, but for the longest time it just wasn’t there for gaming and I didn’t recommend it. With Valve going full steam ahead for the Steam Deck, Proton has gotten so good that for 95% of games things just work out of the box without any issue. Wine even has support for Easy Anti Cheat now and more features are coming every week.

The Max would be major overkill, and might actually be worse for you because of the worse battery life to drive the higher power draw chip. My personal laptop is a 16" M1 Pro MBP and I’ve never had it hitch on me. My work laptop is a similar spec 14" and I regularly run a dozen of programs at once (Outlook, Slack, Chime, dozens of Firefox tabs, Music, and 3 to 4 IntelliJ instances) without issue. Occasionally it does get a little warm when I’m doing 30+ minute builds, but that is akin to many torture tests reviewers use.

Edit: After seeing the price difference is only $200 I’d just get the Max if you don’t mind a bit less battery life.

I’ve never personally used the machine you’re referring to, but unless you’re doing long video renders it likely won’t matter. Programming takes very little resources, even when using a debugger, compared to the torture tests reviewers use. Any heavy load comes in bursts of compiling/interpreting which also don’t hit the machine anywhere close to as hard. Music production might be a bit more strenuous, but still well within the area of not having issues.

I’d say stick with the 14" if that’s what you prefer. It’s not designed to render videos 24/7, but even if you did that it’s still pretty damn fast even when throttling.

Almost any server will have basic logging surrounding IP, especially considering it’s one of the most useful bits of information to help identify malicious traffic, and can be used for a host of other things.