I’d prefer not to dual boo, but it might be the safest way to start? If I dual boot, get used to Linux and (hopefully) get everything I need working, can I then go from dual boot to erasing the Windows partition and recombining so I then only have Linux installed and can keep the work and programs I already installed on Linux?

My personal experience says: try dualbooting first, because it will make you to have a working machine continuously. Taking into account that all Linux-based OS behave vastly differently from MS Windows, it is possible to break things, when learning a new way of doing things.

The drives for my server are NTFS. Does anyone have experience with this format on Linux (I use Emby)?

I’ve been using an external NTFS drive for compatibility and big files storage: works as charm. The worst case scenario is you will need to install an ntfs-3g driver, although it is usually included with the distro.

As for production: I don’t have much experience with that, although I can recommend you looking around tooling that solves the problem. You will need quite a bit of patience and trying things, because switching platform will definitely require you to make some shifts in usual processes you have now. Don’t expect things to be obvious 100% replacement: unfortunately lots of people have this expectation, and get frustrated.

As for hardware, just looking the model up on the internet with adding “linux”, or “ubuntu”, or “fedora” should do the trick of figuring out if it will work.

Exactly my feeling each time I get back on personal PC/laptop after whole day of working with Mac.