A failed warrant canary is effectively a triggered warrant canary. If its triggered, you have to assume the company has been issued a warrant, and is therefore vulnerable.
The IR blasters can usually be flashed with open firmware like tasmota or esphome. I started with IR as well. The downside for me was that IR was one way. You can tell the unit to turn on, but you cant know if it actually did turn on.
I had something manual setup originally as well, but it became a bit of a maintenance hassle. Moving configs to devices was a bit of a pain, and generating keys wasnt easy.
More exotic software will probably come from the internet, but the basics should be on the DVD. Good luck with your journey, reach out if you need any help, im sure everyone here would be happy to assist.
Try increasing RAM voltage? Might make it more stable under load. I had a similar issue, clean memtest, but games would randomly crash. Increasing RAM voltage fixed it.
Last time i used LVM was way back in fedora 8 days, when it was the default partition. It was super annoying to use, as gparted didnt support it, and live cds often had trouble with it. Having to read doco to resize it was pretty not good for a newbie to linux. Has it improved since?