Not exactly sure, but playing with setting up your own VPN will give you an idea of it.

Essentially, the VPN is run on a remote server. When you connect to the VPN, your traffic gets masqueraded out through the remote server, and replies get natted back to you. If you tried setting up a webserver on your computer and then accessing the webserver on the VPN server IP, it wouldn’t work, because the request coming in to the VPN server port would by default just reach the VPN server at that port.

This is where port forwarding comes in – if the VPN server allows you to port forward, you can set port X on the VPN server to go to port Y on your router (which would likely also have to port forward on your router to get to your computer).

If you were intending to seed, yes.

It’s certainly possible to download content after you’ve joined. Some might call that piracy, but I would call it fair use.

Port forwarding allows you to seed without revealing your IP address. If you seed on a VPN and you don’t have port forwarding, your IP is revealed to those you seed to.

Edit – I was wrong. You can technically seed securely behind a VPN connection, but since you can’t be connected to directly behind a vpn without port forwarding, you would only be able to seed to ppl who port forward, or who can be connected to directly. You would only be able to leech from everyone else.

If everyone torrented like this (behind a VPN without port forwarding), all torrents would grind to a halt; nobody would be able to seed.

Oh, nice!

Yeah; it’s pretty great. It lacks the excel functions, but if you know some python that is a total non-issue.

I appreciate your mentioning the downside. I am way too much of a tinkerer for a read-only root to be acceptable for me, but I’m glad you found something you like.

Local python uses ~/.local/bin, so in the interest of avoiding conflict, it is probably better to use ~/bin.

What the heck? This bends my brain.

This is not that big of a deal most of the time, since you are the only person interacting with your computer, but it’s worth remembering when you decide to recycle or donate – you have to securely wipe in that case. Also bear in mind, if you do encrypt your drive, there are now more possibilities for total data loss.

Oh, fun fact: you can change a users windows password inside Linux. Comes in handy for recovery, ie, user forgot their password.

It’s a professional-grade graphic design software.

Ubuntu – the one with the Nelson Mandela video and the picture of people holding hands in a circle.

If it works, it works – glad you found a way

Claws searches reasonably quickly and unlike thunderbird it isn’t a total resource hog. OTOH it suffers from not being multi threaded, which means when you first install it, expect it to take literally hours before it finishes syncing all your emails.

Mutt is not multi threaded either. Only thunderbird and kmail are, and kmail is a buggy mess, while thunderbird eats your ram like it’s a plate of cheese danishes.

Firefox doesn’t suck imho

Look up ffupdate on GitHub. The latest vanilla Firefox on any Linux with just 1 command (after it’s been configured)

Still using Firefox. They mean well. Wish I could say the same of chrome.

Lol; I’ve done this too. Thankfully not to anything important.

Lxqt, with pcmanfm’s desktop ability turned off. I use the terminal for my file management anyway

I usually have several terminal tabs and web browser tabs open plus a tmux session. Neovim for coding and writing, feh and mpv for viewing media, mpd, supysonic, and minidlna for streaming and playing music.

An immutable distro would be a good choice. They are distros designed to be more resilient against failure. For a gamer, bazzite is a solid choice; otherwise, silverblue.