You VPN may have an option under settings called Split-Tunneling - Most well-established VPN providers will have this. This allows you to set the local subnet for your network, and it’ll bypass the VPNs so that local connections are local. Check it out. Otherwise, what you propose works, yes, as long as you’re okay with having that laptop as a single point of failure for your content. At least get an external drive and periodically backup to it as well, and have that drive elsewhere. Good enough starting point.

1. Invest in an Nvidia Shield
2. Install LineageOS Android TV

I have two of these in the household, one of the best tech investments I made. No more homescreen ads.

Thanks for the response, this makes sense I suppose. I personally like being explicit and knowing-at-a-glance what is currently configured, but I can see some defaults being useful for many beginners for instance, and keeping config cleaner.

This sounds interesting. But in that case, how are headers set? From a security and even privacy standpoint the correct headers can be quite important. How do you enable/disable http2 and http3?

Lightning is indeed NOT a fork of a Bitcoin, it’s essentially a Layer 2 for Bitcoin (if you think in terms of the Internet’s TCP/IP model). It solves pretty much every use case created by any Altcoin when competing with Bitcoin, as Bitcoin chose security and decentralization over scalibility in its base layer (on-chain).

As for buying Monero, I only deal with Bitcoin, but I’m pretty sure you can easily buy Monero still as long as you don’t use centralised exchanges (permissioned), and instead use Decentralised ones (permissionless). That’ll be the case for any altcoin that still has decent popularity for the foreseeable.

Not exactly. Lightning makes it super cheap and instant.

Arch was the distro that got me to stop distro-hopping. It’s stable, it has a rolling release, and it’s mine (as in, customizable, manageable).

I guess, if there’s anything I wish I’d known off the bat is that the Arch documentation is probably the best available. So much so, a LOT of it applies to Linux in general and not strictly to Arch.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page

If something breaks, READ the error messages, understand each component, and check the wiki, there’s a very high chance the troubleshooting section has the exact issue laid out.