I switched to Linux a long time ago, it's only getting better and better. After valve started making serious investments in the ecosystem it has only gotten better for desktop usage and it simply 'works' in ways that even windows struggles with, ie: ps4 controllers/switch controllers work ootb, gamescope allows significantly more control over how games are rendered and offers a true console-like experience combined with big picture UI.

Osmand - I use this along Google maps, but it's nice to have entire regions downloaded and it shows more information than Google maps, specifically for back country stuff where you need to see every type of trail

Home Assistant

Wireguard - I love that the protocol is lightweight and secure, makes it really easy to access my home network without needing to expose self hosted stuff to the internet

Bitwarden - self hosted with vaultwarden/SQLite, changed my life and it's really easy to share logins with my partner

Immich - self hosted, the first real replacement for Google photos I've found. It has autobackup and it's really easy to share albums.

Kiss Launcher - I like how simple it is. My home screen ends up disorganized anyway so it's honestly just faster to have a recents list and a quick search feature.

I noticed that during the driver shortages in the US, produce from Cali was noticeably more expensive than local produce (NC region), which made me angry. Chains like target/Walmart didn't bother selling fruit from local farms and would rather sell marked up fruit from Cali. Watermelons grown in the same region were $2-3, whereas from Cali were $5-8. Fortunately grocery store chains did have locally grown produce for cheaper.

Is your VPN running on the same host as ssh? If so it could be a firewall issue. What VPN are you using?

Thin client! They're significantly more powerful than a pi and you can grab them for nothing on eBay and you can use the nvme slots for storage

This is when you paginate. It's pretty cheap for the database to grab a limited amount ordered by certain criteria, you'd just need to make sure your indexes are correct.

I'm not convinced using rust is all that useful for web development. There are already plenty of other mature well optimized solutions for backend web development that includes a lot of security and qol feature ootb.

Yeah, theoretically rust can be faster than ruby/python/node, but it's harder to optimize it enough to get to that point and you will have a much harder time finding devs to work on such a project because the amount of backend devs that have enough rust experience is so small, they're like on the opposite sides of the ven diagram of languages for web developers.

On top of all that, languages which are heavily used for web development often get low level optimizations baked into the frameworks/languages so you can get pretty amazing performance uplifts over time to bring it to the level of lower level languages.