Small private home lab - technical assistance needed.

I need help setting up my home lab I've run into a few issues that I can't fix. I have 2gb fiber ISP Synology ds423+ NAS (Plex server) BEELINK S13 N150 12GB LPDDR5 BEELINK S13 IS A DUAL BOOT WITH WINDOWS 11 AND LINUX MINT XFCE. Primary OS is Linux mint xfce. I travel for a living so remote access, battery backup, and everything coming back online been resuming services automatically after a power outage is extremely important. The router, nas, and beelink 13 mini pc are all on a UPS battery backup. The UPS will tell the nas to shut down when it reaches low battery. The Nas will tell the UPS once it has shut down and the UPS will shut down until it detects that the power is back on. When the UPS turns back on, the nas and the beelink will turn back on (configured in bios). The first thing I need help with is that the default Linux mint xfce themed panel and application menu have both disappeared. When I type the command to bring them back I get the default xfce panel instead of the Linux mint themed one, and it does not come back after a reboot. I have tried all of the simple fixes that I can think of and nothing has worked. Something got messed up pretty bad. At first I suspected that it was an issue with either Wayland or x11 since I've been trying to connect remotely both using the remote desktop connection protocol in addition to rust desk. I have no idea what happened the desktop was working fine and I'm not sure if the device updated and that's what broke it, or if I did something. Either way, I'm completely at a loss and my only remaining options are either completely reformat and set up everything entirely from scratch from the beginning again, or hire somebody to help me because I don't know anyone that can help me. I am the most computer knowledgeable person that I know and even I am smart enough to understand that what I know is only a drop in the bucket compared to some people. I have tail scale setup and the device (beelink s13) is a subnet router. I have a remote user profile setup and RDP so I can connect with my other windows 11 computer when I am traveling. I had rust desk set up but it stopped working and I don't know how to fix it. It provides a much better connection while traveling so I will also need help troubleshooting the rust desk remote connection and I will need it to come back up after a restart so if it is a background task it needs to start with the computer and be ready to accept a connection. I don't need to run a rust desk server because tail scale makes it a direct connection through VPN tunnel. RDP will be my fallback for if rust desk ever has issues again in the future. I have a pi hole set up on the device and it seems to be working good. I have a TeamSpeak server that needs to be up and running automatically when the PC starts. I want to be able to manage all of my docker containers using portainer. I already have portainer installed, but I need help double checking all of my docker containers to make sure that I did it correctly. I have a private internet access (PIA) VPN qbittorrent container set up. It seems to be working correctly. I can see it in portainer, but I actually set that up before I even installed portainer-- so I would like for somebody to double check my work to make sure that it is not leaking my actual IP address or my tail scale IP address. Basically, I'm capable of doing a lot of stuff for myself by picking away at it and researching stuff. I'm stuck on a few things and it has rattled my confidence a little bit. I just have not been able to fix a few things for myself and I need somebody more knowledgeable than myself to double check my work to make sure that there's nothing that I overlooked or did incorrectly. I would like to set up a project zomboid server with a handful of mods for me and a few friends on the beelink s13 in the future. I'm not sure how complicated that will be but i will need to spin the server up when it is being used and save it and exit when is not being used. Server will need to be persistent and resume where you left off when you start it back up and reconnect to it. Both myself and a few friends will need to be able to connect to it remotely. It will need to auto save every few minutes while in use. At a later time in the future, I will also be interested in setting up a modded Minecraft server running on the Synology ds423+ for my kids. The nas has 18 GB of RAM and the server would be running on the nvme drives, which are configured as a storage pool as opposed to a write cache. I think it would be a host machine for this use case. I'm trying to get into self hosting my own services. I need to be able to securely download and archive files for preservation and emulation. I want to be able to build out my own retroarch and Plex library. It's hard for me to have enough free time to research how to do all of this exclusively as a side hobby while working 70 hours per week at my primary job. When I am remote and away from home I just need my services to work without having to troubleshoot them constantly. I think that once I get everything working I need to make sure that I have snapshots or backups enabled so that I can roll back if something doesn't work.