The SSH and VPN traffic is encrypted. Unless your private keys have been compromised, nobody can see what is going over the tunnel. They can log things like the IP addresses that are connecting to it and how much data is being transferred though.

Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t recommend putting something power hungry like a GPU in one of these. A NIC will be fine though.

The DE won’t really make much of a performance difference on a high end computer.

They are not USB based, they just happen to use a USB 3 cable to carry the PCIe signals.

If you don’t want to risk modifying the slot, try one of the cheap PCIe risers on amazon and send it back if it doesn’t work. You will need a case with a couple of extra slots under the motherboard in order to fit the riser in there though.

It will run slower, but that probably won’t be an issue unless you plan to max out all 4 ports simultaneously.

There’s also a PPA if you don’t want to use a flatpak. Just be sure to uninstall it before upgrading to Mint 23 to avoid any issues.

Yes, a used PC can work great for a home server. Just don’t go too old or it will be power hungry. Obviously you will want one with an integrated GPU to save power too. If you want to run jellyfin, make sure it supports hardware video encoding, preferably AV1 or H.265.

Any Japanese made surround sound receiver and speakers than you can pick up from a thrift store or craigslist will sound way better than the modern junk. It will have a big, heavy power transformer and linear amplifiers. There will be no internet connected spyware either. If you find one from the 90’s, it will likely have a phono preamp for your record player too.

It’s never worked for me either. The ClearURLs addon has a function to copy a clean URL and that works great though. It’s open source, so maybe someone could turn its cleaning function into a program that could be used for the clipboard.

There’s musikcube if you’re looking for a terminal based player.

It still can’t sort or browse by album artist, which makes it a real pain to use. You have to apply a patch and compile it from source to make it usable.