Dabbled with Linux over the years but have finally made the jump to using it as my primary OS. I tried a bunch of distros and settled on the elegant simplicity of Mint. Every game has worked just… fine.
It feels genuinely refreshing to know nothing will change without my consent, I know I will not login one day to find a surprise cortana/copilot/clippy icon in the taskbar or an ad for Avowed waiting for me. I can’t believe that is even considered a ‘pro’, but here we are.
I strongly recommend symfonium on android. Plexamp is a really polished app but I found the handling of downloaded files quite poor, I don’t think you can even search downloads when you’re offline? (other bonus to symfonium is it supports jellyfin and sources, in case you were to ever fully move away from plex)
I have definitely seen worries about tailscale in other threads related to a recent VC funding round, I suppose they haven’t aggressively started the enshittification journey (yet), and it is also a bonus that most of tailscale is open source, e.g. headscale exists.
If tailscale started reducing the free service # of devices/users to push people towards their paid ‘personal plus’ plan then maybe we’d see a similar backlash. I say this as a tailscale user myself.
I’m in a similar position but perhaps a few steps ahead. But still needing to regularly lookup things like “how do I do <basic thing like move a folder> in linux?”. The other reply mentions tailscale which I agree is the best for your use case, super simple set up, secure and free, you just need to run one command on the machine or VM and it guides you through the rest. There is an option to allow access to your local network as well (haven’t used it, but have seen it in options). Then it is just like connecting to a vpn from elsewhere to get access.
The other alternative option you might want to explore is a cloudflare tunnel (I used the cloudflared docker container). You’ll need to buy a public domain and then that can redirect to a service you want (e.g. you could access jellyfin from ‘jellyfin.yourname.com’), I set up two-factor authentication which then only allows certain e-mails to get a code to login. This means you don’t need to connect to a VPN and can access from any machine and browser. I’ve used this for things like silverbullet and planka.
AMD. I think if I had nvidia I might’ve gone for Pop OS, I heard that has good support for them out the box.