Wireguard (or tailscale) would be best here.

Well that’s great, airvpn has worked well for me in my torrent docker container and I recommend it for that purpose.

That’s a fair point. But it also depends on the application as well.

To use the example from earlier, good luck getting Emacs 25 to run on Windows 11.

…but maybe another perspective is that it works really well with Windows because they prioritise backwards compatibility at the expense of development time and they can do that because they’re a large company and as a large company the community gets a very little say in the way that their operating system works.

Linux is your operating system. It’s community driven and community developed and one of the expenses of that is that users are going to need a higher degree of technical capacity. The trade-off is that you get more privacy, and more say.

However, I believe that it’s achievable for most users.

I mean this sincerely, how can I help? I’m not an expert but i did teach this to university students and I’m a big advocate of privacy. What would you like to see?

Yeah I’ve installed heaps of old apps, it depends on dynamic vs static libraries etc but some people still use Emacs 25…

I have lost power whilst updating, can be a nuisance depending in the distro, but snapshots (zfs and btrfs both work well for me) have been life saving.

Mac and windows simply don’t have a lot of quality of life features. Working with them is painful. As self a documenting systems they are fantastic though, however, when I was younger we had things called schools that served to address that gap, these have fallen out of favour in modern times.

For privacy I recommend arkenfox

I believe airvpn has port forward.

Set up wireguard in a docker container and then forward the port to wireguard, the default container on docker hub is fairly straightforward and you can always ask me for help if you need :).

However, If you are using ipv4, you need to make sure that you’re not behind a CG-NAT (If you think you might be, call your ISP and tell them you have security cameras that need to get out or something like that).

You could also try tailscale which is built using wireguard with nat-busting features and a bit easier to configure (I dont personally use it as wireguard is sufficient for me).

After that Caddy + DNSMasq will simply allow you to map different URLs to IP addresses

• dnsmasq
  • will let you map, E.g. my_computer -> 192.168.1.64
• Caddy (Or nginx, but caddy is simpler)
  • will let you map to ports so e.g.:
    • with DNS (DNSMasq as above)
      • http://dokuwiki.my_computer -> http://my_computer:8080
    • Without DNS
      • http://dokuwiki.192.168.1.64 -> http://192.168.1.64:8080/

Caddy and DNSmasq are superfluous, if you’ve got a good memory or bookmarks, you don’t really need them.

VPN back into home is a lot more important. You definitely do not want to be forwarding ports to services you are running, because if you don’t know what you’re doing this could pose a network security risk.

Use the VPN as the entry point, as it’s secure. I also recommend running the VPN in a docker / podman container on an old laptop dedicated just to that, simply to keep it as isolated as you can.

Down the line you could also look into VLan If your router supports that.

I personally would not bother with SSL If you’re just going to be providing access to trusted users who already have access to your home network.

If you are looking to host things, just pay for a digital droplet for $7 a month, It’s much simpler, You still get to configure everything but you don’t expose your network to a security risk.

If you’re just going to VPN in to your home network, I’ve found caddy to be the simplest.

It’s fairly well documented and the up to date packages are very convenient.

It can also be pretty confusing installing debian and having to find how to install packages that aren’t out of date.

Imo take a few hours to power through the wiki installation guide and it’s really not too bad + you’re equipped to fix issues as they arise. It’s not Gentoo. When Ubuntu breaks for a new user, it’s a nightmare too.

So I think I disagree, it’s been easier to use than Fedora, Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Elementary in my experience. I use Gentoo too but that is indeed simple in the challenging sense.

Arch is a nice middle ground between Ubuntu and Gentoo.

Plus, with EndeavourOS users can have their cake and eat it too.

I think this combined with the solution provided in this comment Will be the most robust approach and solve all your problems.

That’s what I would do

Mate is really nice, I was always a fan. (Although XFCE is nice too). However, I dont believe it has support for Wayland yet?

I think LXDE has Wayland now but I haven’t tried it.

This is based on my experience teaching at university, Your mileage may vary. This is what I found to work the best for first year students.

It is actually quite bad to use. If for whatever reason I needed a commercial OS I’d have to use MacOS at this stage.

Microsoft has really dropped the ball in terms of quality.

Endeavour OS. It may be a bit more hands on than something like Ubuntu/Fedora but there are ways less abstractions, better document and community support that makes it simpler over all.

Pick up a note-taking application like Joplin or something and write down solutions to problems and you’ll be fine.

I’d recommend against Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint etc. tbh, they are simpler on the surface but there are no ing parts that make it more complex when things break.

Play around with distrobox and docker too, that makes a lot of stuff easier.

Absolutely the best way to learn though. The number of places I’ve walked into that had no clue about containers or even a vpc and thought Google drive was an API is too damn high.

Mobile offline sync is a lost cause. The dev environment, even on Android, is so hostile you’ll never get a good experience.

Joplin comes close, but it’s still extremely unreliable and I’ve had many dropped notes. It also takes hours to sync a large corpus.

I wrote my own web app using Axum and flask that I use. Check out dokuwiki as well.

Oh good to know.

It used to be awful but I’m glad to hear it’s improving.

Maybe snapdrop?

When I was obsd I did FTP and rsync for everything. Syncthing had dinner performance issues for me.

Maybe Seafile but I had a bad time with that.

From memory MTP is pretty flaky and quite slow.

ADB push is pretty good but at that stage rsync is just as easy.

Put SSH in the phone and you can do it all from the computer too.

To be fair, wireguard is pretty painless.