Bye boy. Bi woman

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Have you considered using a mesh VPN instead of opening a port to the public? Nebula and TailScale are both great options that have a free tier which is more than enough for most home use cases. With Nebula you can even selfhost your discovery node so nothing is cloud-based, but then you’re back to opening firewall ports again.

Anyway, its going to be more secure than even a properly configured reverse proxy setup and way less hassle.

Another vote for Bazzite, or really any of the Universal Blue images. There is no other distro out that is as full-featured and bulletproof for Linux newbies. Since gaming is important to you, Bazzite is almost certainly the best choice. It comes in both Gnome and KDE flavors. KDE will feel more familiar coming from Windows.