I'm a Proton slave, all my eggs are in their basket so I'll go ahead and provide some free marketing for them. ProtonVPN is pretty good since it's ran by a good company that cares about you, getting Port Forwarding setup on Linux is a bit of a chore but I believe they're working on automating it, the Windows app does have it automated already by the way.

I do worry about the long-term practicality of ProtonVPN because of this manual process, since as far as I can tell there's no way to automatically hand your assigned port to the torrent client...

Linux is not a prerequisite nor is it a required side effect of digital privacy, sure the two go hand-in-hand thanks to FOSS but you can have one without the other.

Red Star is a Linux distro, but it's the embodiment of the antithesis of privacy.

I use Hetzner exclusively and have just one complaint. You don't get much choice as to where your VPS is hosted country-wise nor the OS it runs. You do get the standard list of options, as you would with any other provider, except that list is quite small on Hetzner. It's good enough, I use Fedora everywhere and they support that so I'm good. Anyway, it's obviously free to create an account so there's no risk in case your setup isn't supported.

Apart from that, they're brilliant. The web console is nice, clean and well-designed, great value (1TB of storage clocks in at a few euros/month), room to scale and a decent company. Can't comment on customer support since I've never needed it.

For the services you've specified, that'll run you maybe 3 - 4 euros a month (that's with automatic backups of your entire server + tax) since you can run all of that under one server.

I will never see mouse cursors the same. Thanks random internet person!

Yeah, of course I shoot some support over their way. It's just if I do that it also comes down to the whole ownership thing too, hence the downloading.

No.

A notification, in the tray and elsewhere across the OS, with a short description like "Updates are crucial to the security of you and your device, they also provide the freshest experience." would get the point across. What would be even better is if there was a one-click NQA button to initiate the update, perhaps even included on the notification.

Mine, Fedora Atomic Budgie. Materia GTK Theme. Intended to keep the focus on my windows rather than my desktop or theme.

I pay for Proton Unlimited so I use Proton VPN. Getting port forwarding to work on Linux is a bit of a hassle but they have steps on their website. It's hardly any slower than my internet connection, but that's because I'm on the paid servers. The free servers are rather slow. They have a graphical client for Windows and Linux.

Proton Unlimited is €12.99/month. The VPN has a good number of features and you get the whole Proton suite with it and 500GB of storage. You can pay for just the VPN which is cheaper if you don't want the rest of Proton.

Pretty much that to be honest, so all of your apps are flatpaks. The base system is also kinda sandboxed, it's access is prohibited and instead you employ "layering".

I use Fedora Atomic on my desktop and laptop so I'll explain that one here. Atomic distros function off of Atomic transactions, which are a process form that can only successfully complete. If an Atomic transaction did fail, the entire transaction would be undone and reverted. This practically makes Atomic distros unbreakable. If an update fails, what update? Who said there was an update? No trace.

Obviously you can change the base system, as flatpak isn't suitable for all apps. This is where that layering comes in I mentioned earlier. I use XFCE-Terminal, obviously not a great candidate for a flatpak. So to install a package normally (as if through DNF) you need to use a packge manager that deals in Atomic. Fedora Atomic ships with their tool called rpm-ostree. I don't know quite how it works but I'm pretty sure it creates a branch of the current system (like Git) and installs the package there, then upon next boot you'll use the new branch and the old one discarded. Doing this means that if the package failed to install, your system is unchanged.

Atomic distros are super cool and I can't imagine not using one. They do so much that should've been done a loooong time ago. I highly recommend them. I have an unpublished blog post about my experience using Fedora Atomic that I'm more than happy to post here if you'd like.

You could look into Atomic distros if you value sandboxing, such as Fedora Atomic or Vanilla OS. I don't know much about the debian space as Arch was my first distro so I kinda ran before I crawled.

Ok, hold on...

Can it be self-hosted?

Pretty sure the 7000 series is known to be not well supported yet since they're new and didn't have massive uptake, so I don't want to be that guy but...

Some research before hand on what GPU to get from AMD wouldn't hurt?

I've got a 6800XT and had absolutely 0 issues since I got it about a year ago. I see from your replies you're on Arch, so I guess just wait for things to improve unfortunately.