Make sure your devices/browsers don't have "private DNS" or "secure DNS" or something like that enabled, it will bypass your DNS server.
Is that much of a big deal though? Running old GPU drivers is fine, other than maybe if you like playing the latest AAA games down the road.
I mean eventually it will be an issue, but for a long time I imagine they will work just fine.
Windows only applications mostly. The ones I use are Fusion 360, Photoshop, Lightroom, and NI Labview. Unfortunately CAD/Graphic design software also often really struggles to run in WINE, especially with updates happening fairly often.
I've thought of a windows VM, but that's just not worth the extra effort of dealing with hardware passthrough to get proper GPU acceleration.
I really like Linux, all my servers and VMs run Debian or Alpine. But it's just a lot of work for desktop use in my experience (yes I know some of you have never had a single thing break), stuff just randomly breaks for no reason, I'll do a system update and just get a black screen from botched GPU drivers, or back when I ran GNOME my extensions would randomly break after an update and never work again, sometimes installing a simple application like steam would nuke my package manager.
As much as people complain about windows and some do have poor experiences, for me it's pretty much set and forget, I installed W11 on my desktop maybe 4 years ago shortly after release and it's just.. there. It works fine, it doesn't break, all my apps, games, and drivers still work after updates.
IMO no.
Small instances can have issues with federation and now showing all replies/content.
There's also the aspect that you'll need to moderate content stored on your server, if someone posts something illegal and your server caches it, you're responsible for cleaning it up.
The service will always be on a port, that's just how networking works.
Do you mean you want to get rid of the path and serve it on the root or a subdomain? So https://searx.mydomain/ instead of https://mydomain/searx/
What do you want to do? Your explanation isn't very clear on that..
For me it's too much time investment, I don't want to tinker with my OS. The fact that it's so common to screw up a system that atomic distros are becoming much more popular is a good example, I want an OS that doesn't get screwed up in the first place.
It feels like the general consensus is VPN=malicious rather than "VPN=“this guy is just trying to protect his privacy”.
VPNs are used for malicious purposes. After all if a VPN keeps no logs, doesn't track usage, and lets one pay with alternate currency, why wouldn't someone use one if they were wanting to commit a crime?
For any service it's a battle between avoiding blocking actual users, and keeping out the bots and malicious users.
A VPN with a paid dedicated IP may help, or a DIY VPN hosted on a VPS somewhere, but I'd argue it's not really any better than just using your ISP at that point since all your traffic comes from your own unique VPN IP.
A big one IMO: Scramble/remove EXIF data on any photos you upload online: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.jarsilio.android.scrambledeggsif/
If you don't and a photo was taken with location enabled, that photo has a location attached to it accurate down to a few feet in some cases. It also contains data on which direction you were facing.
Some others:
Keepass is very good. Bitwarden just has a server side so it's easier to set up and use for multiple devices.
Nope, it's 100% centralized.
That's fine for us techy people, but my parents would not be able to do that.