Beginner here, what is the smartest process to setup new stuff?

Sorry if the sub is not quite fitting, I am not quite sure where to put it since its a bit broad. I am asking this since I just spend 3 days setting up nextcloud and spent the most time on seemlingly random issues. And this is so far my general DIY-IT experience, both on my linux pc that i am using for 1.5 years now and my first attempts at turing my old laptop into an homesever. Like, the main part of the first day I spent figuring out, why the console in the proxmox-interface stopped working. In the end it was a browser issue and switching from librewolf to firefox fixed it (in hindsight i should have seen that option earlier, but in hindsight you are always smarter). Now, nextcloud kinda works, but for some reason it keeps logging me out on reboot (gnome-keyring is installed) and the webDAV up- and downloadspeeds are in the kilobytes/s instead of ca. 12 Mb/s with the nfs setup I had set up like a month ago (replaced it, because I thought it would be less of a mess if all my data is in nextcloud instead of two places. Also, I had no idea how i would organize the two places best in proxmox). So what I am asking is this: Is there a general way of going about setting new stuff up? Some set of basic knowledge that one should learn before starting out? Some way to make stuff work more reliably? Normally I just look up some guide (arch wiki is normally great) and try to follow it closely. If I have more specific goals than "It should just run" (i.e. when i set up hyperland on my pc) , I read in the documentation. But if something along the way just randomly not works, and that happens quite regularily, I spend days hoping that I find something online. I normally avoid forums, because I dont want to bother people with problems I could theoretically figure out myself and also its a hit-or-miss between being really useful and just posting logs for days and still getting nowhere. Also, asking ChatGPT or something, is for me a sign of absolute resignation, since when I tried that so far its either going in circles or straightup breaks more stuff. Maybe this whole post is just rambling cause I am frustrated a and it just takes time to figure new stuff out, but I mainly wanted to make sure that I am not missing some way of making my life easier. So, thanks for any advice.