No problem!

I completely know what you mean, it took a lot of research before I felt comfortable enough trusting a public instance enough to use.

So that solution would still decrease their ability to fingerprint you by a lot, but really the big problem would all the people/scripts randomly hammering your ip. They wouldn’t get past your password. But it being public and discoverable would meant you’d constantly be getting hit with a bunch of automation scanning your ports. And the security risk isn’t the concern, it’s more the heavy traffic slowing down your connect from them. It sounds like you’d be fine from a security stand point. But you’d have to put up something to block the traffic.

You could always self host, use that when you’re at home or connected to home through VPN and use it for more personal searches, and then use public instances when you’re connected to other vpns for more general or vague searches. Mixing and matching like that will at least add some noise and make you less identifiable. Kind of best of both worlds.

(Not an expert) hosting your own instance will make you more identifiable to big tech than if you used a public instance, but it would still increase your privacy compared to giving everything to them, and also prevent you from giving a public instance your data. I currently use “priv.au” but do plan on hosting my own in the near future. Some people who host their own instance even intentionally open it up to the public to crowd source more data points so that their traffic blends in better (not saying I recommend that though).

Tldr: it should still be worth it

In regards to connecting, you should still be able to hop from other vpns to your home network, just keep in mind they you will get higher latency jumping from their VPN network back to yours. I don’t recommend opening it up publicaly just to do that, unless you plan on going all in and having something in front of it like “fail2ban” and Anubis" another option is looking into “tailscale” and if you don’t trust their central server you can selfhost with “head scale” or use a different but adjacent product “pangolin”. These products basically let you creat your our VPN that spans multiple network.

OP, I had a similar issue, and I had to blow way the wine prefix.

Someone else will have to chime in, but I believe it’s the “compat data” folder, but be careful because some games like to keep saves in there.

After you do that, as someone else mentioned, try GE-Proton.

Also I’m not familiar with your card, if it is older, I believe there is a certain gen where they stopped adding older cards to the newer drivers. A lot of the distros you mentioned are new, maybe roll the dice and if you feel up for it try Debian. If games boot, the. You either have to grab the open source driver or use an older version.

Also for the future (after you’re up and running) you shouldn’t skip the shaders. Steam crowd sources them from similar configs and build, and vulkan can generate them before playing so that game play is smoother. Direct 12 trys to generate shaders during game play, which results in stuttering.

Oh and pangolin for a VPN tunneling replacement.

Proxmox communities are also good for some ideas, basically every sysadmin I know eventually spins up a cluster and builds their ideal tech stack that they wished they could use at work.

You should stick with more “corporate” or adjacent distros, that way they (or you) can purchase a support contract without having to reinstall or shift later down the line, so more like fedora or opensuse.

Postgress is more mainstream than SQL server in cloud native environments, no licensing. And plenty of managed option without too much of a lift and shift.

Next cloud might be an option to replace office 365, should look at open/only office (forget which one is active) along side libre office.

I think jitski can help replace zoom/teams, kind if.

Biggest hurdle will be excel and Active Directory Nothing else comes close to as feature (and hair pulling bug) filled as excel.

For AD there’s not even really an equivalent, but that can be a good thing. I would look into combining an Oauth service (keycloak is suppose to be good for “consumer” grade, Okta or whatever preferred cloud provide has for more professional) along with something like a casbin library (at least for servers/development).

I highly recommend following all the self hosted and open source communities here on Lemmy, I find new tech at least once a week from them that I consider taking to my bosses.