1. I host at home so unfortunately can’t give you any advice on a vps

2. If you’re torrenting, yes I would recommend a VPN. If you’re setting up docker containers, gluetun is what you want to use. It’s a client you can use to connect to most major VPN providers

3. You don’t need to open your server to the internet for you or your partner to remotely access it. You can use tailscale (or manually setup wireguard) to remotely access it without exposing anything. Alternatively, if you still want to open it, you can use fail2ban. I don’t know enough about networking to tell you exactly how secure it makes you, but assuming you’re a normal guy who isn’t pissing off any major corporations/states/etc it’s probably fine

4. I haven’t clicked on any of the links you provided, but I assume they mention the *arr stack. Some other goodies that may not have been mentioned though are jellyseerr, which has a nice frontend to search and request movies and TV, and homarr, which is a dashboard you can setup to sync with your other hosted apps. I have a couple extra I could tell you if you want, but I think these are the most important for a basic “official feeling” setup

On howdy’s own page it says that a well printed photo or someone who looks like you would be enough to fool it. Idk how secure Windows Hello is, but howdy is designed for convenience over security

If anyone uses jellyfin you can also use jellyseerr, it’s just a fork of overseerr designed to work with jellyfin

This sub has a megathread that has a list of trusted sites for general use and specific categories. It also has sites for direct download if you prefer it

This might make me sound like a chess elitist, but it can’t have been much of a chess club if they couldn’t beat you because they “can’t figure out what your next move is.”

I definitely get brain damage every time I open this app

Any Debian/Ubuntu or fedora based distro will do you fine. I personally ran PopOS when I built my computer earlier this year and didn’t have any issues with it

At this point we don’t even need native ports. Developers can just make a windows version and we can play it with proton

As the post says it’s about the same quality as a Rick roll. Take that as you will

Probably not common to spell it out like that, but yeah I don’t see any reason why it’s something that people wouldn’t say

I would also recommend it, and I even tried it when i started, but i just couldn’t get it to work. Probably permission issues

For a while I split tunneled tailscale through an openvpn .conf file, but recently switched to using qbittorrent in docker with gluetun. Qbittorrent is realistically the only service that needs to be behind a vpn so it works out well

I’m sure any server oriented Linux distro will do fine. I use Debian.

I will note, I don’t know if you’re planning on having remote access (e.g. through tailscale or reverse proxy), but if you are, I found it quite a challenge to get proton to play nice with them

Yeah I thought it would be a long shot but I figured i should mention it just in case, good luck finding a distro

I know you said you want to use KDE, but Pop is actually working on their own DE, called Cosmic, to be released with the 24.04 version. It’s currently still in alpha, so it’s far from finished, but if you’re trialing other distros anyway I don’t think it would hurt to boot it up and explore it (at least for a few minutes)

Adding denuvo later wouldn’t do any good, if a game launches without it it’s going to get cracked instantly

About the second point, your pc shouldn’t be putting any resources towards a VM if it isn’t active. Just shut it down, close it, and play games on your host as normal.

One more thing, I’m assuming you’re doing your gaming on Steam. Check ProtonDB for all of your games to see if they work on Linux (protondb only lists steam games, so if you have games as well, I’ve found a google search usually does the trick). You might find that you don’t even need a VM

What is that fanfiction headass conversation at the end lmao

New desktop environment being made by the guys who make PopOS. It is currently in alpha version 2

Fellow Linux noob, just started using it earlier this year so if someone with more experience wants to weigh in, please do.

That said, gaming on Linux is pretty good. Steam’s proton makes most games playable out of the box, although it’s still a good idea to check Proton DB to see if any particular game you want to play is playable.

As for your other question, I’m not totally sure what you mean by accessible and customizable, but I don’t think any of your peripherals are going to be distro locked. The Arch Wiki is a pretty good resource for, well, everything, but most relevant to you for your peripherals (it also usually gives good information for any distro, not just arch)