Server (navidrome) + client (feishin, symphonium) + music (soulseek, bandcamp, ripping your old cds) + remote access (tailscale or something else if you’re savvy).

MX is great. The MX tools are very useful and Sysvinit isn’t as difficult to use as I had assumed. It runs great on an old thinkpad of mine. Seems like a very viable option for people looking to self-host on older gear.

I put LMDE on my partner’s old surfacebook and installed the surface kernel. It runs smoother than windows ever did, battery life improved too, full touchscreen. Though I did install fedora prior to LMDE and the touchscreen functionality may have been better with that, but the system was slower overall.

You can buy the Tailscale/Mullvad plugin, I think that’s the only way to make the two work together “seamlessly”. I didn’t want to pay for that, so I put a reverse proxy and tailscale on another VM and pointed the reverse proxy to the services I want to access remotely with tailscale.

I never tried a paid one - might be the next step?

I’ve found no way to do this, tried everything. The question for me has changed to “how do I create a dummy google account for instances when I do seem to need to log in” and I’ve pretty much given up on this too. They require a phone number; I haven’t been able to get them to accept any kind of temporary number service/app I’ve found online, I could try harder to acquire some kind of more private burner phone or sim card but I feel like they’d just try to verify me once I no longer have access to the number and I’d get frozen out.

Mint (LMDE). It might actually be easier to use than windows. My dead dad could use it and he was a moron. I held out for quite a while to try out ‘cooler’ distros but yeah, Mint is what I’m telling anyone moving from windows to use now.