I have always been pro-privacy, but in a kind of lukewarm, "I wish someone would do something about this" way.
What has finally pushed me to ditch services from large corporations over the past couple of years is not really a concern for privacy, its a drive for self-sufficiency.
As basically the last stepping stone, as of a couple of weeks ago, my email, calendar and contacts are self-hosted, and it's just... So freeing.
Start with Linux Mint. It should be a very pleasant and straightforward experience right out of the box, and is just in general very beginner friendly. I recommend to create a live USB (basically, download the ISO from the Mint website, then use something like Balena Etcher to put it on a USB stick). You can then boot off that stick, and try Mint out to your heart's content, without risking your Windows install or data at all.
Can I ask, what are the programs you wager you'll have to emulate through wine?
I've recently switched from Backblaze to a Hetzner Storagebox. 5TB for only slightly more than I was paying for Backblaze.
They support BorgBackup out of the box, so super simple to set up encrypted, differential backups
I'm waiting for the Proxmox NixOS project to take off. I like the (network) seperability.
Yep, no leak.
Laughs in Proxmox + NixOS
(yes I know not for every usecase)
Yeah. Boost itself is great though. Well worth the couple of bucks to get rid of the ads forever.
Oh, didn't even know you could do that, lol
Good idea. I get a number of CORS errors - but I also get them without the VPN, so I don't think that's it.
The idea that CR doesn't block me, their content hipster does though - that might have merit. Hm. I have noticed that some sites require me to solve the Cloudflare Captcha. So maybe that happens when requesting the page/stream, and then since I don't (can't) solve it, nothing happens?
Do you have an idea how I could verify this? π
Alright, this is weird. I ran tcpdump on the server, and checked both physical and wg0 interface. For things like youtube, it's a constant stream of packets coming in on the physical interface, then immediately being relayed through wg0 - just as it should be.
But for Crunchyroll, there's.... Nothing. I get an initial burst of packets when opening the site containing the video I want to stream, and then packets just stop coming in once the page itself has fully loaded.
Ah, good news in regards to gaming, esp. Steam gaming!
Steam invested quite a bit of energy into "Proton", essentially a new kind of compatibility layer. If you remember tinkering around with wine and winetricks from years ago, that's basically gone nowadays.
For most games, just go into the Steam settings for that game, and under "Compatibility", check the box.
Then click download, and play. That's it for most games π
Also check out protondb.com - it's basically a community-sourced database cataloging how well Steam games work on Linux.
Good luck on your Linux journey, and feel free to ask questions if something comes up! :)